It is great to finally have physical copies of the book I’ve been working on for some time ! There has been no official launch moment yet, but at long last it is finished and printed and slowly it is becoming available through regular channels. The plan is to organize a launch after the summer.

The official blurb of the book goes as follows:
“This publication came out of the artistic research project Dialogues With Machines and narrates Joost Rekveld’s personal experience of such a dialogue while making the experimental film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59. Historical analogue computing and simulation techniques were re-enacted, old electronic machines were sought out and cared for, and new devices were developed, based on principles that have long fallen out of use. During this process the dialogue changed, the notion of learning from machines changed, and Rekveld’s views on technology, mathematics, and media archaeology were also transformed as a result. This led to a perspective on the relation between humans and machines that is not predicated on control.
‘Our technical milieu is a collective product, a long-term external memory to which each generation contributes. We cannot act or think without it, and the design and development of our technology is therefore a form of politics that shapes our life-world, our planet and ourselves. During this project, media archaeology became an approach to investigating this collective construction. Conversely, it led to an understanding of films, installations, talks, and writings as small gestures that may contribute to shaping it.’ (J.R.)

Liberate the Machines! started as one of the long essays that made up the written part of the artistic research PhD thesis that I defended in october 2024. Using the making of my film #59 as a vehicle, I am proposing three different answers to the question of how new things can be learned from old machines.
In this particular case the machine was an analogue computer in my studio. Working with it led to me to questions about chaotic systems and the agency of computing machines in the discovery of chaos by Edward Lorenz and by Yoshisuke Ueda in the early 1960s. How can machines that are made to be predictable, and that function perfectly fine, still lead to surprising discoveries ? Questions around their agency lead to the discussing the circumstances in which electronic analogue computers were developed. How did the military environment in which these machines were developed influence their design and functioning ?
The themes of the Cold War context of the development of computing and the agency of computing machine come together in the book The Closed World by Paul Edwards. I encountered this book at the moment where my own reflections on the agency of machines and mathematics came together with a growing – and entirely unanticipated – awareness of the military origins of the old devices that I had been filling my studio with; the labels indicating their former owners started to become a map of a small part of the military-industrial complex.
These questions lead to a view of both technology and mathematics as collective constructions. When I started to use the phrase ‘dialogues with machines’, I used it to refer to the back-and-forth between building prototypes and observing what they are capable of. But during my research project this gradually came to include a dialogue with the larger collective construction that our devices are part of. All physical machines have a potential that is not yet realised, partly because our perspective on them is determined by the place they currently occupy in this construction. But new interpretations can be discovered, that place can be changed and new uses can be found. It is this freedom that makes interactions with machines and mathematics more than a monologue of the ancients and an actual dialogue with the networks that surround us.

The book’s 176 pages were designed by the ever brilliant Isabelle Vigier, after final editing was done by Bureau Doove. It was published by Studio Joost Rekveld in Brussels and KASK&Conservatorium in Ghent and it is distributed by Idea Books in Amsterdam. The ISBN is 978-94-91564-18-5. The research project Dialogues with Machines as well as this publication were funded by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.
At the moment the book can be ordered online at Idea Books, or you may prefer ordering it at the friendly webshop of Underbelly Soundartmedia (who also still have my 11 Films). Both of them ship worldwide. If you are a shop and interested in offering it, please contact Idea Books. Please contact me if you are interested in reviewing it or organizing an event around it.