Knots, tangles and the becoming of mechanical beings inside compost
Wild Machines proposes the creation of two biodegradable machines made from biological materials collected from two Costa Rican ecosystems. The goal is to install them in these ecosystems and document on video the processes through which they degrade and reintegrate into the environment.
These videos will be presented in the exposition room as well, along with a third sculpture, which will degrade in the room through a humidity system activated by the guests visiting the exposition.
Conceptually, the project aims to make speculative technologies visible, namely technological devices created with materials and manufacturing techniques that are closer to ancestral knowledge, with materials of biological origin belonging to ecosystems that are specific, renewable and respectful of the environment. These devices turn into speculative design pieces by reconnecting with organic materiality with the new technologies. This allows us to imagine a scenario where machines become hybrids with their environment, where they expire and reintegrate.
Wild Machines / Jonathan Torres, Photo: Jonathan Torres
Wild Machines / Jonathan Torres, Photo: Jonathan Torres
Wild Machines makes use of the power that speculative thought provides to imagine a present world that revalues to matter, a place of technologies whose preprogrammed expiration is in relation to the needs of the environments and not those of the economic system. Technologies that use energetic and material resources with a degree of balance.
If technological devices generate discourse and create knowledge (Deleuze), it is urgent to think of the nature of these technologies. What if machines could become compost? Compost that decomposes in the modern world and blends in with the leaves and bugs. How could we achieve it? What new processes would we need? How can we all conceive of such a thing?
Precarious machines, soft, fragile. Possible machines with functions still unknown and uncertain. Wild Machines.
Credits
Videos:
Idea/dirección: Jonathan Torres
FotografÃa: Jonathan Torres, Oscar Herrera, Fabián Castellón
Dop y Edición: Óscar Herrera Naranjo ( FotoSono )
Musicalización: Alex Catona
Montaje de sala:
Control electrónico: Daniel Sánchez
MuseografÃa: Jonathan Torres, LucÃa Araya.
Jonathan Torres RodrÃguez (CR)
Visual artist /Professor of design and prototyping at the University of Costa Rica (UCR) at the schools of: Plastic Arts (Material Workshops), Biology (Biomimetics Laboratory) and Medical Technologies (Design and Manufacturing of Orthosis and Prostheses).
Investigator at the Institute of Investigations in Art (IiArte – UCR): coordinator of the EnTrópico Project: Experimental Laboratory in Electronic Arts from the recovery of electronic waste components generated at the UCR. In charge of the Hybrid Lab: Experimentation Laboratory for methodologies in manufacturing practices both by hand and digital.
Constantly playing with the active force that curiosity implies, his pieces confronts the viewers with images and objects whose structures invite thorough scrutiny. The use of fragile materials along with complex mountings in unconventional spaces turn the spectator into a co-creator, a co-destroyer, eliciting games where interaction is crucial.
His recent artwork explores the concept of the post-natural, focusing on materiality as a symbolic element and questioning the techno-scientific discourse.