Reading about | machinic animism

“In Guattari’s “cosmology” there are all sorts of machines: social machines, technological, aesthetic, biological, crystalline, and so forth. To clarify the nature of the machine, he refers to the work of the biologist Francisco Varela, who distinguishes two types of machines: allopoïétique machines, which produce things other than themselves, and autopoïétique machines which continuously engender and specify their own assemblage. Varela reserves the term autopoïétique for the biological domain, for reproducing the distinction between living and non-living which is at the foundations of the Western paradigm; whereas Guattari extends the term to social machines, technical machines, aesthetic machines, crystalline machines, and so forth.” – Machinic Animism, Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, p. 99.

I wonder what kind of machines Brynjar Sigurðarson‘s objects can be considered to be? And how he envisions them himself? He once told me he calls Coathanger (image), one of the family of objects that form Silent Village Collection, ‘elephant’, in his mind…

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Further reading: Animism, Extra City, M HKA, Kunsthalle Bern, Steinberg Press, 2010. Generously borrowed to me by dear friend and film maker Carlos Casas!

Images:
Drawing, Sophie Krier, 2014.
Coathanger, Silent Village Collection, edited by Galerie kréo, Brynjar Sigurðarson.