Set: Lonely Machines
is a speculative realtime renderization of feelings of neglected technoscientific agencies in outer space. It is a sticker set from lonesome machines from spatial exploration first published in the Telegram group “Zentrum für Netzkunst”.
For humans, machines are “either serviceable or threatening” (Puig, 2011). They socially function “as mediators – that is, actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it” (Latour, 1993: 81 qtd. in Puig). Sometimes, added to this intrinsic value, comes the technological fate of becoming spatial debris or ending in an endless idle.
Do these machines have feelings? Are they capable of having an aesthetic experience?