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Collector's Statement, from our host Steve Calvert:

Like many artists who talk about themselves formally in the third person plural, Bachelor Machines is a magpie, packrat, bowerbird, which daydreams it's a hive of honeybees... driven by its the restless curiosities of its compulsive search functions, tuned to narrow wavelengths and selection pressures... From great volumes of collected data, impossibly, patterns of information emerge, visible often only to intuitive compound eye of the attuned otaku...

I'm a collector. I very much enjoy a very few specialized things: drawings, books, music, ideas and the people who make these things - I also contain a gregarious social impulse to know what people are making, and the coincident impulse to share what I've found with those others i know whom I think would be interested. Hopefully, with this project, I can do us all the respect and good-service of facilitating the physics, of connecting certain dots, to produce some energetic exchange in our individual economies of attention...

I have had the unmistakable good fortune of knowing alot of really spectacularly talented artists already in my young career. It has helped considerably that I prefer to work collectively. Most notably, my participation in the Intermission Artists Society from 2001-2006 confirmed that life gets more interesting when you cooperate rather than compete. I can't, or won't, think of my own art without considering and directly implicating the context of my colleagues and antecedants - those artists and friends whose work and camaraderie I so greatly admire and appreciate. As personal solution and salute to my colleagues, I've been wanting to build up this project forever...

I keep a library, and an art collection, and love finding and tending these collections... many industrialized people do, I imagine - how unique do you really guess we are? We all shop at the factory store on these colonial plantations... The collector regards the collection as a matter of near constant attention ... these are activities I do anyways, have to, and would very much like to see happening on a much larger, distributive level. Some of these producers, including me, didn't previously have websites - I needed an online portfolio, so I built one for myself and some friends, which quickly spiralled into a much larger idea for an integrated research project ...

Conceptual abstraction, procedural formalism, abstract drawings, humourous detournments, a not-infinite list of subjects appeal to what I think are coherent and importantly enduring in contemporary aesthetics - it may be notied that these things don't necessarily describe my own work - they do however describe something of what I consider to be interesting in art generally... - in this and other modes I resist the injunction that the individual's tastes are unique - the individual can assert proud narcissism only in his alienated state... this argument will play out in these pages, as I know this point of view is not shared by some numbers in our company...

Drawing together this network of creators attracts my own project toward what feels like a developing connective synthesis - a grand idea gathers its threads backwards from the future, casting a shadow in time, indicating an approaching event-object moving close across the fog of synchronicity... The actors in this becoming-drama are all around me - significant people with great ideas - the discussions we've had are momentus, i wish to have recorded and transcribed them... - in important ways, these ideas fit together in perfect complimentarity - clearly there is only one thing to do...

Bachelor Machines is my attempt to chart the constellations of what is, in my estimate, a substantial philosophical phenomenon - one form among many, granted, and struggling in obscurity for relevance like the rest - but this particular one, very importantly, is directly known to this provincial journalist by close proximity and deep longterm interest. Not least of all then, this website functions as a fanzine - a gratuitous gesture of praise in recompence for all the ridiculous brain-twisting glee these artists' efforts bring to me... Like satellite imagings of a particularly beautiful remote nebula forming in the western field of creative activity, BMO will report with salubrious affect on the spectacular vapor-forms emerging from these young stars...

I pull these names together because I see and love their work. In many cases we are acquainted personally, to varying degrees, but as the project expands and correspondences develop, this will cease to be the case. Otherwise, links to expanding collections about particular artists known to me will continue to accumulate here. Other than my selecting them, they are of themselves a disparate and unaligned groupings of independent creators. By chance and good fortune we are colleagues.

My curiosity and enthusiasm for other interdisciplinary artists makes me feel compelled to celebrate and expound publically on their significance as contributors to the contemporary art of the third millennium's first decade. I salute them as magnificent human beings who generously produce their compositions with great skill, humour, and sophistication - For this they receive my deep thanks, and deserve your fixed attention - anyone aesthetically inclined should someday know the names and clever wits of these gentle men and women. All my relations, but man these kids are good...

--- Steve Calvert - Vancouver - March 2008