Art and Reality Machines: Plans for Overcoming the Fatalism of Capital and its Critiques

This text addresses a range of historical and popular models/machines that have attempted to render the randomness of reality itself. These have been used to represent the failure of such models, but also, genuine attempts to produce a form of metaphysical engine have been sharply criticized for their intrinsic or explicit alignment with capitalist ideology and theism. In response we explore attempts to cut, divide and intervene within these machineries as they continue to say something about and constitute reality for us. From this departure, we address other views of randomness, towards a view of change as occurring through other structures, acts and determined systems. Here, we can ask specifically how art might play a role in the production and picturing of different, heterogeneous machines that might be adequate to the complex reality that it describes, thus escaping its troubling self-fetishization, where art has cast itself as the very embodiment of randomness.