ChristopherRobbins PhpWiki - Misguided Machines

Misguided Machines

Misguided Machines are constructed to appear as if they are failing at what they were built to do. Rather, they succeed in what they are trying to do, it's just that their goals are so misguided that in "succeeding" all they really accomplish is to show just how little they understand of the world they live in.

It was inspired by 10 years working overseas, never really being sure if what I was doing had any real value in the culture I had placed myself into.

I've been fortunate enough to live and work in a few different countries in my life, and I've realized that I learn the most about a country when I make a mistake big enough to show me the gap between my assumptions and theirs. So that's become my focus: the gap - not how to bridge it, but how to focus on it, amplify it, and learn from it.

This series of misguided machines is an attempt to reveal another culture by constructing a similar exchange, in which we come to understand something of that culture by experiencing what they do not understand about ours. Their misassumptions about what constitutes life result in failures borne of good but fatally misguided intentions.

DmPatheticCreature

Part 1: A life support for a dying animal made of garbage
Part 2: I think she's trying to save the fish

These videos are the first two in a series of physical animations crafted from wood found in the garbage. Each chapter extends the "story" as it extends the machine. In the first chapter we are introduced to a life-support system for a dying animal built from wood rescued from the rubbish bin. A windshield-wiper motor cranks a cam that pumps a bellows that allows this little piece of fur to breathe away within its feebly lit shack. This attempt at breathing life into a scrap of fake fur is extended in the second chapter by an attempt to save a real but already dead animal- a mackeral hanging from a branch over a bucket of water. An arm extending from the bellows is attached to a saw that cuts away at this branch, hoping to release the fish into the water below.

Early (failed) prototypes

The Information Ecosystem, in which WE harnessed the natural network of our ecosystem as an information transfer medium, is without doubt the greatest invention of all Scriptkind. In this exhibit we explore several early (failed) prototypes of the Information Ecosystem: mobile units for turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and back again.

This piece traces an alien culture's failed attempts at exploiting the "comminication" process that takes place between humans and plants in the form of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Through this Other's mistakes, we come to understand this Other's misconceptions about human life and information transfer, learning something about their nature by seeing where theirs and ours fail to overlap.

Related Works

Zizek, The Parallax View

"We do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective."

Mike Bouchet

''Bouchet has commented that his works often "come out of an 'attempt' at something... I like the gesture of deliberately failing at something." -PS1 Greater New York 2005 Book, p. 84

Kurt Vonnegut

This series of misguided machines is an attempt to reveal another culture by constructing a similar exchange, in which we come to understand something of that culture by experiencing what they do not understand about ours

"The strategy of this novel is to invert the science-fiction convention whereby humans are depicted attempting to comprehend the processes of an alient world. Here, contemporary American society is the 'alient world'. Vonnegut defamiliarizes the world that his readers take for granted, through the technique of employing an ex-Earthling narrator who is now living on a different planet and has set out to 'explain' Earth to his fellow inhabitants. The defamiliarization had more than a satiric function, however. It reveals Vonnegut's own despairing recognition of the sheer impossibility of providing a critique of commonly accepted cultural forms of representation, from within those very modes of representation."
-Waugh, Patricia ( 1984 ). Metafiction. The Theory and and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen. Speaking about Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions"