Lecture by Pablo Lafuente
Speaker Sommerakademie 2012

Social Machines

Kunstraum Oktogon, August 20, 2012, 18.30h

In 1912, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire take a road trip with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. The general relationship between eroticism and the machine often identified in Duchamp’s work is, then, a relationship that can be speculatively related to a specific situation – be that with a concrete machine (the car) and the proper names (of those occupying the car). Speaker Pablo Lafuente will use this as an example as a way to address how machines can initiate or support social relations and will focus specifically on the mobile sculptures made by the artist Lygia Clark during the late 1950s and early 1960s, to speculate on what kind of relationships these ‘machines’ have occasioned in the past and can today or in the future originate.