Simon Ingram

University of Auckland, New Zealand

 

Unthunk Device

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Monadic Device is an endurance-based artwork of sorts modelling a surrealist, digital-energistic interaction between human user and painting robot. It is tool-based, a laboratory-like mise-en-scène whose performance is enacted within a technical-artistic open-cube framework containing a human user, an EEG headset, custom software, painting robot and materials rich in painting’s semiotics. The work’s first public iteration is in the former railway factory at Sydney’s Carriageworks (September 2018). A key feature, something that provides it with an independent operational structure — and is constitutive of its containing habitat (or zone) for an artistic-machinic reflection/self-analysis — is its open cube framework which encompases, as a physical cubic space, all the operations of the work.  If Jack Burnham’s notion of artist as ‘deviation system’ is important here, it is because the work invokes systemicity and a return to the subject. By simultaneously drawing with a stylus into the robot’s software interface which also runs a wandering self-avoiding line algorithm visualising electrical impulses from the user’s brain, the user operates an EEG Painting system and undermines its veracity, creating deviation within it by setting two modes of drawing off each other: drawing by hand “with agency” and drawing by brain “without agency”. This variety of real-time contradiction, a core part of artistic practice, is further abstracted considering that the work’s machinic otherness is predicated on the user’s own otherness (their subconscious mental activity), and that a robot makes gesturally expressive marks ordinarily associated with the trace of the artist.

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