Among the Machines

Résumé du livre

"Curated by Su Ballard and Aaron Kreisler, AMONG THE MACHINES challenges thirteen contemporary artists to document a twenty-first century in which machines, humans and nature have come together. Situating the long-term concerns of ecology alongside the hopefulness of utopian thought, and with a focus on the South Island of New Zealand, the works in the exhibition offer a speculative map for the future. The exhibition brings together for the first time a number of leading contemporary Australian and New Zealand artists ... Each artist presents two works: one chosen by the curators and the other a new work that creates a response to or provides a counter to the original work. AMONG THE MACHINES expands on Samuel Butler's late nineteenth-century imagined journey to the unknown interior of the South of New Zealand. In his novel, Erewhon, published anonymously in 1872, Butler presented a satire of western society, machines and environment that prefigured a disturbing shift in societal and technological relations. Butler suggested that the next step in Darwinian evolution belonged to the machine, perhaps at the expense of the human. AMONG THE MACHINES examines connections between geographical locations, fictions, and fragments of our technological imagination ..."--Dunedin Public Art Gallery website.