Q: So where’s the war or art there?
A: They are ways of generating, wasting or displacing forces, just like weather, with the exception that they insist on the vanity of purposefulness. They speed it up. These forces are contained in the predispositions of organised matter, that is to say from geology to culture, and the ways, at every scale, that they create patterns of interference within and between each other.
At particular scales of resolution there are certain patterns, such as armies and their means of feeding off their host societies, that attempt to contain this interference, to lock it into step. It is at this point that technologies for creating such repetitions, such as photocopiers, are generated. In turn, these technologies create new possibilities for the circulation, creation and reverberation of forces that add to the potential for destabilisation. They contain within them an unconscious, in the case of the photocopier, drives for the escape from work – as with Chester Carlson. This machine unconscious is a set of potentials which simply need realignment and combination with other elements in order to tip things in the lock step out of balance. A machine that can only make copies becomes a means for making things different. Obviously this is an absurd effort. But it’s the absurdity that has it on the side of escape. How does this technology reduce work?