Chapter 6: Art and the Machine

Art—broadly defined to mean performance, visual, textual, and so on— cannot be separated from its historical conjuncture. Art is part and parcel to the social fabric in which it is created (Focillon, 1992). I turn to art in this book not because it has been free from the technological impulses that are found within other intellectual, creative, and aesthetic practices; indeed, art has embraced a machinic world, along with critiquing these developments and exposing the horror that a technological reality may bring. Art has been enamored with machines since their first inception it seems, especially as it has played a role within artistic creation for some artists (the work of the Futurists as an example of this machinic turn is discussed later). Art is not simply produced, but instead explodes as a creative force from bodies steeped in alternate perceptions of a collective past, present, and future. Deleuze and Guattari illuminated art as work that produced emotional explosions, what Grosz (2008) has aptly described as “sensations, affects, intensities” (p. 1). It exists as the potentially unbounded spirit. In other words, art is situated within an affective realm: the emotions, creative spirits, and desires of a potentially creative humanity.