TOTAL RECALL – Il(l) Machine – Ars Campus Israel

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Il(l) Machine is the Campus-Exhibition of TOTAL RECALL – The Evolution of Memory. It’s the first ever collaboration between the art- and technology-centered institutes and universities of Israel, offering a showcase of the current trends and developments of a country with one of the richest cultural heritages in the world.

We are now living in an era where new digital technologies based on automated procedures and agents are de facto mediating between us and the world, and thus cannot be perceived just as signifiers of a future horizon, but rather mark a new phenomenological phase in human existence. Many of these technologies have matured and have practical implementations which are used as part of our daily lives, and they arouse greater concern about the ways these technologies influence our emotional states and take part in constructing our identities, both as individuals and as part of the community. IL(L) Machine suggests and examines these new relations between automated procedures performed by machines in direct relation to real life. The works presented tackle machine automation either as entities that have physical manifestation in the world, or through actions originating in algorithms that manipulate data in virtual spaces through time, in effect reconstructing the reality we encounter.


Travis – Robotic Speaker Dock and Listening Companion by Guy Hoffman, Gil Weinberg, and Roberto Aimi is more than just your usual jukebox, the robot’s not only playing music, but is interacting with the listener.

The exhibition focuses on two main perspectives in relation to automation mechanisms and hence to the ways they are emotionally and ideologically approached. The first approach derives from the realization of the power of computer algorithms in data analysis that can be considered analogous to the act of mapping. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between mapping and tracing, it can be claimed that the new computational technologies enable “uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined”, and therefore unfold potential grounds (Corner, James. “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention”. In Denis Cosgrove, ed., Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). 213.) Those potential grounds can reveal phenomena related to psychological, social and political issues in a way that sheds new light on historical as well as current reality, making it possible to decipher our world in new ways.


For Sound Map 2013 by Ilan Green, the acoustic environment of the old town of Jerusalem has been recorded and is reproduced, transmitting the atmosphere of this great city into foreign places.

The second approach is related to the concept of “transcoding” used by Lev Manovich, which claims that computerizations of culture involve the projection of the machine’s unique ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics onto the cultural space (Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT P, 2001. 64-65.). Thus, machines are not simply the tools we use, they also reconstruct our cultural reality. As such, they can be the stimulators of the constitution of new power relations and structures of control in new emerging spatial and temporal dimensions. This is related to generative mechanisms as well as to representational ones (See Bruno Latour’s analyses of the automated mechanism of renaissance perspective in which he claims that the relations between objects and their representational tools, are not limited to the representation of reality, but can also serve as a means of controlling reality. Latour, Bruno. “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Vol 6, 1986. 1-40.)


Poetic Machine – 3d Ceramic Printing by Or Galor reflects on old and new methods of creating pottery, new technologies enabling people to create similar potteries without the need of knowing thousand-year old techniques.

The IL(L) Machine exhibition shows a new generation of artists emerging from art academies and research institutions, bringing forth a critical examination of the relations to technology as the manifestation of a new era. In a country characterized by a very active and innovative high-tech industry with a charged historic identity and profound political conflicts, this critical approach leads to different perspectives regarding the influence of new technology on our society. This exhibition reflects the living and present conflict of Israeli art, which pivots around the urge to relate to complex local issues on the one hand, and on the other hand aspires to take its place within the ongoing global discourse.

Lila Chitayat – Project Initiator and Creative Director
Yael Eylat Van-Essen – Curator
Oren Zukerman – Strategic and Creative Adviser
Sayfan Borghini – Scientific Advisor and Assistant Curator
Eyal Vexler – Artistic Producer

The exhibition can be seen from September 5th to September 9th 2013 as part of TOTAL RECALL – The Evolution of Memory, various performances being part of the exhibition as well.