MACHINE FETISH
On all fours, smelling the leather.
If writing ULTRA wasn’t an act of existential desperation, I might linger on more familiar ground:
That because AI is an average, a mean, composited from existing data sets and outcomes, it can never take true leaps.
That people and intelligence will no longer be the same raw edge, but compute will be.
That as the cost of average tends towards zero, taste is more potent than graft.
That the best combination will be symbiotic: human intuition, machine precision – spark and systems.
Yeeeeeeeah for sure – if I was boring as fuck I would say AI can only combine what has already existed, and so again we need to get above the algorithm.
But I am writing out of pain and inspiration, so I’ll say instead that a synthetic mind can never compete with embodied knowledge.
When I write from inside my body, it feels completely different, and the output is different.
Machines can only play with words; they never get past the mind.
The felt sense is a paradox, both fundamentally unknowable, and with knowledge of everything.
What you see as the cause of that is more a matter of philosophy.
But even as you read these words now, there are little glitches in your metabolism, micro-reactions; when you hear your favourite song it’s not just a sonic effect but it’s rousing your spirit, the autonomic nervous system is clicking into gear when you glance at your loved one, the energy centres so beloved of mystics are spiralling whenever you hate yourself.
Maybe it’s because your metabolism grew before your consciousness, maybe because we all sprouted from our own perineums, maybe because god gave you a soul.
It’s up to you.
But as engineers develop new ways to recreate a neural map, they miss the point. I have been realising slowly, ever so slowly, that our thoughts and our selves are not contained just in the mind. They live in our fingertips, our spine, our breath, the unconscious rhythm of our organs. Intelligence isn’t just in the brain—it's distributed through our form.
A few months ago, I was persuaded to get on a reformer machine. I loved it.
Over the last months this passion has deepened. You could say it’s because I have lost the shackles of the fitness-industrial complex, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚎𝚡𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚕𝚙𝚝 𝚖𝚢 𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢, and instead to simply feel my body. I can simply feel the tension across my body, discover and stretch hitherto unknown muscles, and feel complete without breaking a sweat.
(the fitness-industrial complex… similar to the art world you’re familiar with, just creatine instead of ketamine).
But really my love for the reformer is because at its heart it’s a sadomasochistic apparatus.
Touch one – feel the leather and metal, run your fingers over the ropes, your feet on the wooden boards, twist your wrists into the straps – feel the tension as the machine simultaneously supports and restrains you.
place the box on the carriage
It’s ok to find it sensuous.
get on all fours
It’s ok.
put your feet in the ropes
It’s a machine fetish.
Partnering with the machine is not about what your body wants, not even about what the machine wants, but something about the interaction between the two of you.
There are others that compel this dynamic, at least for me – old cars that stink of petrol, handmade pianos, gorgeously clicky analogue technology. I’m sure you have a few that push your buttons.
I crave the strangeness that comes from this melding. I crave its potential.
I want to go to a gallery that trusses me up and expects something of me.
I want to lie in a pilates class that binds me and simply tests my patience.
Are you lying uncomfortably?
U>N>I>T>E>D (2025)
Chunky Move never strikes me as the future. But I’ve enjoyed Anthony Hamilton’s work and the fusion of human form and robotic exoskeleton is a little tantalising, mechanical limbs brandished and grappling like the many-armed forms of Vishnu and Kali.
U>N>I>T>E>D is the dramatisation of post-human mythological beings – and right now, grappling with questions of biohacking and life extension, we live in a time where once again those in power wonder if they can make the leap to godliness. We know how that story ends, same as always, but in this performance I feel a presence, asking – what is it that we want to be, if not this?
Finis Musicae [The End Of Music] (2024)
Sage Morei + friends created a cybernetic orchestra, bringing together bio signals, robotic avatars, extranumerary extensions – a organic-synthetic cornucopia of machine-assisted musicality.
Once upon a time, Sage had heart palpitations, prompting the exploration of whether an erratic pulse could directly rewrite Beethoven.
Now, years on, the technology is a servant upon which one might become increasingly dependent. Not purely a question of ability, but of addiction – how could one ever feel this force of creation, purely from the mind, and relinquish it?
See it here, or read more on Coeval
Lady’s Glove
For years, Laetitia Sonami has used a signature instrument of her own creation, the Lady’s Glove. The device is a custom-built elbow-length glove embedded with sensors that translate hand gestures into sound. Her body becomes both instrument and instrumentalist, blurring the line between controller and controlled.
When you watch FKA Twigs and Imogen Heap playing with mimu gloves, it’s worthwhile considering the lineage.
Upgrade In Progress (2023)
Geumhyung Jeong’s robotic sculptures blur medical devices and pleasure objects.
She performs with these machines in intimate, theatrical choreographies that question human-machine boundaries and dependencies. Who, exactly, is giving and receiving here? Who is this for?
We are full circle: the technologies of our own creation becomes the tawdry fantasies of our desires.
We are in lockstep, all bound up with the machines that both support and control our wants.
What is your machine fetish?
.
.
.