“Everywhere it is machines and machines are not alone.” This powerful statement from curator ZHANG Ga is at the heart of the sixth edition of Device_art festival and it’s large central exhibition Machines Are Not Alone in The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. Rooted in the idea of new machinic ecology, the presented artworks reveal on many different complex levels this machinic nature of our reality: the poetry of our machinic surroundings, the machine that is ourselves, the machinic interconnectivity which determines our very existence.
"The world is machinic. Not only does its function depend on a network of machines, such as data farms of distributed servers over the surface of the Earth, assembly lines that stretch endlessly long, and transportation vessels and vehicles crisscrossing the continents, out into space and traversing oceans; but also the land, rivers, mountains, trees, animals, cultures, and histories are all machines of some sort when seen from an operational point of view or an abstract sense of the word because they are systems of interconnected biospheres, geochemical aggregates, hydrodynamic flows, neural synapses, motor-sensor coordinates, psychosomatic attributes, social relationships and technical milieus, imbricated, intertwined, transversal and reciprocal, as intricate as the relationship between humans and thoughts, knowledge and freedom." (ZHANG Ga, exhibition curator)
