This is the public start page of my personal librarinth: an online scrapbook that I am using in the course of the research project 'Dialogues with Machines'. I am undertaking this project as a researcher in the Media Arts Studio of the KASK Conservatorium / University College Ghent, and I am pursuing a doctorate in the arts with it as part of the S:PAM, Studies in Performing Arts and Media research group at the University of Ghent. My promotors are Christel Stalpaert and Edwin Carels.

A fairly recently (020240301) updated short description of my research goes as follows:

This research project started as an attempt to deal with a question that Socrates gets asked in his dialogue with Meno: how can we learn something we don't already know ? I have been exploring what I think is one answer, that new things can be learned in interaction with devices outside of us. It is an answer that interests me because what I have been calling a 'dialogue with machines' has been at the heart of my media-art practice for many years. But despite these roots, the aim of this project is not primarily to think about art; the aim is to clarify the concept of a 'dialogue with machines' and expand it to a view of technology that is also relevant outside of the arts. By focusing on the agency of technological artefacts in speculation and creation, I hope to contribute to a reflection on technology as something else than a tool to subjugate our planet and ourselves.

The idea of a 'dialogue with machines' refers to a back-and-forth between thinking and making. Concepts shape tools and art works, and in turn, tools and art works shape concepts. It is a back-and-forth that I know from my practice as a media artist, in which it often occurs as a form of toolmaking in the service of realising abstract animated films. A type of imagery becomes defined at the same time as the device is built that is required to produce it, and concepts and techniques articulate each other along the way. It is a process of mutual construction of artist and art work.
Implicit in this back-and-forth process is an absence of hierarchy. What was perhaps initially encountered as a detail can very well lead to a conceptual overhaul of the whole project. Being attentive to something small may lead to adopting a vantage point from which relations of size and importance suddenly appear very different. I think this is one reason why one can learn from such a process.

Practical work in this research project has focused on the room full of historic and recent analog computers that has been my studio for the past few years. I have been doing artistic experiments in a form of media-archeology serving two purposes that are almost diamatrically opposed: I seek to illuminate aspects of current practices by going back to their origins, and I look at the past as a rich and relatively accessible source of difference. The main artistic outcome of this was the film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59”, a feature-lenght abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits. During the cold war, the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems produced our computing technology as a side effect. During the same period, in 1961, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos through their computing systems. In film #59, humans, aliens and devices vacillate between these poles of machinic chaos and planetary control.

In my reading and writing I am trying to articulate some possible sources of what can be perceived as an agency of machines. This is taking the form of a collection of seven essays called “Seven Devices” and a separate text with the title “Liberate the Machines !”. This last text gives theoretical and historical context to the making of my film #59, and narrates my personal experience of a dialogue with machines in the process of making it. I show how in this process the dialogue changed, how my ideas of learning from such a dialogue changed and how this dialogue changed my view on technology and media-archeology. Our technical milieu is a collective product, a long-term external memory to which each generation contributes. I now believe that we can not act or think without this technical milieu. The design and development of our technology is therefore a form of politics that results in something even more significant than explicit legislation. This made me understand media-archeology as a method to investigate this collective construction. Conversely, I now understand films, installations, talks and essays as small gestures that may contribute to this collective act of shaping.
The seven essays in the collection “Seven Devices” are pin pricks probing corners of this technological milieu. I discuss topics from the history of electronic analogue computing, animated automata, cybernetics and self-organisation, looking for different angles on the concept of a dialogue with machines. These essays do not include personal accounts of my experiences with actual instances of these devices but they are attempts to understand historical connections and unfold some of the concepts associated with these histories. A unifying thread through these essays is the notion of a relative absence of hierarchy, demonstrating itself in a receptivity to criticism of different forms of determinism, be it technological, mechanistic or logical.
Recurrent references in these texts are the work of Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, and to a lesser extent Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, N. Katherine Hayles and Alfred North Whitehead. One suprise of this research project was the inevitability of Kant when thinking of purpose and self-organisation in machines.

The film that I made, the collection of essays and the “Liberate the Machines !” text start from the same place and point in the same direction. The first two essays concern the machines that I was in an embodied dialogue with to make the film, and the last essay closely relates to plans for my next investigations and artistic projects. The findings also align even if the methods are very different. I believe that we shape our technical milieu and that this shaping is not determined by laws that are inherent in technology. At the same time, I believe humans are not in charge, since we are not the only factor determining the technical milieu that shapes how we act and think. I see all three of my investigations as extremely modest steps in the direction of a 'historical epistemology', that investigates our relation to this milieu through both theory and practice. Two big words that capture my curiosity for other modes of thinking and being, but which also contain a promise that the current outcomes do not fulfill and of which I am not sure to what extent it can be fulfilled at all.

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 want to be notified when this book is available.

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.”

Some more information on the film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59 can be found here and ofcourse in the written part of the thesis. You can subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on social media to be notified of upcoming screenings, or you can contact me if you are interested in screening it.

• presentation at Alchemy Filmmaker symposium in Hawick, Scottish Borders (March 2017).
• article about analog computing in Arts.Codes online magazine (May 2017).
• presentation at the symposium “Arts Filmiques et Expérimentations Optiques Contemporaines” at the ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris (October 2017).
• premiere of #57 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 2018), and a blogpost about #57.
• artist's talk at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (September 2018).
• keynote and artist's presentation at the VectorHack Festival in Zagreb and Ljubljana (October 2018).
• Film programme curated for the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam (November 2018).
• artist's talk at the 'Golf' festival, Haarlem (December 2018).
• artist's talk as part of the 'Memoires Vives' exhibition at the Zebrastraat, Ghent (January 2019).
• artist's talk at the Digital Media Program of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (January 2019).
• exhibition of installation #71.1 during the Sonic Acts festival at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (February 2019).
• artist's talk at Creative Coding Utrecht (May 2019).
• exhibition of (partially reworked) installation #71.1 at iMal in Brussels. (November 2019)
• seminar at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). (February 2020)
• artist's talk at the Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, Arnhem (May 2021)
• artist's talk at the Institut für Musik und Medien, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf (July 2021)
• artist's talk at Media Arts Technology, University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) (October 2021)
• Lasertalk Brussels at iMal, Brussels (December 2021)
• artist's talk at the Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, Arnhem (April 2022)
• artist's talk at the Collegium Helveticum, Institute for Advanced Studies, Zurich (May 2022)
• exhibition of video and in-progress analog computer plots at the exhibition “Wave: Moonshot Part Three”, Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (July-September 2022)
• artist's talk at the Vectorhack Festival in Zagreb (October 2022)
• try-out screenings of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Vectorhack Festival in Zagreb and Šibenik (October 2022)
• try-out screening of my film “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) at the “Eureka!” event in the Beatrixpark, Amsterdam (October 2022)
• artist's talk at the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam (November 2022)
• artist's talk at the Digital Media Program of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (November 2022).
• screening/performance of “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) during the opening night of the Inscience Science Film Festival, Nijmegen (March 2023)
• artist's talk during the “Shifting Cosmologies: More Than Human XR” lunch series, V2 Lab, Rotterdam (May 2023)
• try-out screening of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Anifilm animation film festival in Liberec, Czechia (May 2023)
• artist's talk “Dialogue with the Tool”, Tetem, Enschede (May 2023)
• premiere of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (May 2023). A review by Dana Linssen (in Dutch) can be found here.
• artist's talk “Liberate the Machines !”, live visuals performance and screening of film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” at Conflux festival, Rotterdam (June 2023)
• screening/performance of “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) during the “Obviously Unthinkable #6, the Art of Cold War Science” event at iii in The Hague (September 2023)
• presentation “Tending to Machines” during the “Alien Organicisms” panel at the 2023 conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, in Tempe, Arizona (October 2023)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Light Matter Film Festival in Alfred, New York (November 2023) A review by Michael Sicinski can be found here or here and a shorter review can be found here.
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the International Science Film Festival Inscience in Nijmegen (march 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) as part of the feature film competition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan (march 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) as part of the feature film competition of the Kaboom Animation Film Festival in Utrecht/Amsterdam (april 2024)
• talk “A Stroll through Technological Worlds” in the “Sensorial Otherness” panel, part of the “Shifting Cosmologies: More Than Human XR” track of the Politics of the Machines conference in Aachen, Germany (april 2024)
• talk “Exaptation and the Analogue of Fabric” in the “Evolutionary Pathways” panel, part of the “Holistic life of the machine – The machinic beyond – What is it like to be a machine ?” track of the Politics of the Machines conference in Aachen, Germany (april 2024)
• talk “Lightning Empiricism: Analog Computing and Homology” at the “Future Tense Symposium 3.0” at the UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California (april 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at Anthology Film Archives in New York, as part of the Prismatic Ground Festival (in an amazing pairing with the Indian abstract film “SYZYGY” by Akbar Padamsee from 1969) (may 2024)
• participation in the panel “Computing Using Physics; What Can AI learn from Analog Computing ?”, that I co-organized at the CPDP.AI conference in Brussels (may 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) in Cinema OffOFF in Ghent, Belgium (may 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana, as part of the Adela Festival. Before the screening there was a lecture by Wolfgang Ernst on analog computing, afterwards we had a panel discussion (june 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) in Cinematek, Brussels, Belgium (june 2024)
• talk “Lightning Empiricism: Thinking Through Devices” at the Hugarflug artistic research conference at the Icelandic University for the Arts in Reykjavik (september 2024)

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”.

After seven years, 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 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.