The Machinic City - Moé for Solarpunk Books

Paperback, 204 pages

English language

Published 2024 by Manchester University Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-5261-7906-7

(1 review)

As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses several performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future.

While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of …

As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses several performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future.

While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines.

3 editions

Fionnáin reviewed The Machinic City by Marcos P. Dias

Another machine is possible

4 stars

Marcos Dias is a thorough and somewhat traditional academic. He writes academically about art with a sober tone and deep, thorough research methods. This is his first full book, and in it he focuses on the human machine and how we perform in cities.

The study begins with an underpinning of philosophy and sociology, giving thought to what constitutes a machine, the etymology of the term, and how digitisation and industrialisation have changed it. Then it focuses on artists that challenge the widely accepted view of the machine, drawing from different interactive performance-based artworks, but mainly focussed for most of the book on the work of UK-based group Blast Theory. In well-measured and well considered steps, Dias unfolds an idea about how art can make visible the subtly hidden infrastructures and behaviours of everyday urban life. It is a fascinating read, if somewhat specialist.

Subjects

technology
surveilance
art
performance