Table of Contents

welcome!

This is the public start page of my personal librarinth: an online scrapbook that I used in the course of the research project 'Dialogues with Machines' that ran from February 2017 to October 2024. I undertook this project as a researcher in the Media Arts Studio of the KASK Conservatorium / University College Ghent, and it resulted in a doctorate in the arts as part of the S:PAM, Studies in Performing Arts and Media research group at the University of Ghent. My promotors were Christel Stalpaert and Edwin Carels.

The most tangible public results of this project are a written thesis and my film #59. The public defense of the PhD took place on the 28th of October 2024, and the committee consisted of Charo Calvo, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Jerry Galle and Jean Paul van Bendegem, with Maximiliaan Martens as chair and Pieter-Jan Maes as the secretary.

thesis

The abstract of the thesis runs as follows:

“This dissertation constitutes the written part of the artistic research project Dialogues With Machines. In Joost Rekveld's practice as a media-artist, the notion of a Dialogue with Machines refers to a back-and-forth between devising and observing. Implicit in this back-and-forth process is a relative absence of hierarchy between verbal thinking and making, and between the maker and the made.
The essays collected in this dissertation are attempts to uncover possible sources of the agency of machines. In the long essay Liberate the Machines !, a theoretical and historical context is given to the making of Rekveld's film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59, a feature-length abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits during the Cold War. It also narrates Rekveld's personal experience of a dialogue with machines in the process of producing this film and in devising the analogue computing tools that were used for making it. These two strands come together in a view on the interaction between humans and computing machines and the role of media-archaeology in investigating this relation, interpreted as an example of the mutual construction of humans and their technology. Under the title Seven Devices, Rekveld wrote seven media-archaeological essays. Topics are discussed from the history of electronic analogue computing, animated automata, cybernetics and self-organisation, each constituting a different approach to reflect on the agency of machines.”

The full text of the thesis can be found here. The first essay, Liberate the Machines !, is in the process of being published as a book, with generous visual documentation and historical material. Please let me know if you would like to be notified when this book becomes available.

film

Some more information on the film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59 can be found here and in the first essay in the thesis that will soon become the book mentioned above.

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presentations and publications

this librarinth

The idea and form of this librarinth are inspired by FoAms libarynth. They describe it as: “a hybrid between a library and a labyrinth, a maze of pages in various stages of completion. It is a deeply intertwingled collection of documents, notes and randomness”.

Even after completing this project, I am still navigating the question of how to reconcile my desire for openness and sharing with the need for a walled garden where ideas are allowed to be fragile. Over time the issue has also arisen that the pages on this site contain the material for several potential articles or other publications, so sharing before writing and publishing those has become a less obvious thing to do. So far, the path of least effort and resistance has been to just keep everything private, but not without regrets. The idea is that parts of this garden will open up and be listed below, other things will find their way to my blog. Eventually, all that is worthwhile in here will become public.
If you are one of those with guest access, your password will open this door for you.
You can always contact me here.