A simple machine that automatically turns the light on, when the light automatically turns off.
The initial idea for this machine was as a solution to the annoying problem of when working late in the studios the lights turn off automatically. This would mean that I would have to stand up every now and then to wave at the light.
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It's funny that I thought it would be easier to build this machine then to go through the beurocratic nightmare of university admin.
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I liked the idea of the two systems in conversation with each other, responding infinitely, never quite managing to settle their dispute.
Perhaps this is what the future will be, a machines talking to machines.
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I am reminded of how Lacan describes language as something that can never be completed. that we could go infinitely on describing something, but that it could never quite be enough. The final sentence is always just out of reach.
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When creating this machine I was thinking about the start of Anti-oedipus:
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"Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
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[...]
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There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring -machines everywhere schizophrenic machines, all of species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside no longer have any meaning whatsoever."
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Delueze later goes on to describe how our 'identity' is defined by the gaps, the uncoupling, between these machines or lines of flow. That difference is primary to identity.
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What produces the separate 'identities' of the university light system and this machine is precisely the gap or delay between them. The quicker they respond to each other, the more their identities would start to merge.
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