--- ALEPH ---
Bachelor Machines is an online curatorial experiment, exhibition space, and collegial fanzine assembled by Steve Calvert in Vancouver BC and territories imagined elsewhere.
Bachelor Machines is a collection, but not itself a collective. It may yet begin to resemble one, if cells cohere and differentiate. Artists presented appear at their consent, but are completely independent and otherwise unaffiliated beyond a loose aquaintance with the editor. *
Bachelor Machines gathers and displays online collections and references to work by artists who are addressing a particular sensibility in the local culture - in the effort to participate in and contribute to a speculative discourse on constructive feedback, emergent systems and other anomolous 'pataphysical machines which appear and articulate themselves on certain wavelengths of our coincident creative practices...
Bachelor Machines' directive is to collect, display and promote artists working in or around this vague terrain of generative processes, symbiogenesis and cybernetic attractors - we have special interest in radically minimalist and maximalist expressions of this particular episteme, further narrowing the gate with a preference for abstraction...
The discussion continues everywhere elsewhere, ambient and quietly simmering. The generative milieu is being explored not only speculatively in contemporary visual art, sound, and philosophy, all emphasized here, but also pragmatically in cognitive, computational, social, biological, architectural and engineering sciences. Its tell-tale pattern-repetitions iterate themselves everywhere, rattling in my head like a jubilant apophenia. I've determined then, to explore this idée fixée in the context of my artistic community - reach out, amplify the vibration, and build some bridges...
Flexible parameters have been set up as selection pressures - attempting to operate within a relatively strict interpretive limit system - an arbitrarily narrowed cone of attention yet to be given name - [...tho I believe the Cone has been proposed and seems comically appropriate...] .. there are in fact numerous fields of disparate participants, within a constellation of influence and historical forces, producing a rich nebula of artifacts and information - insightful, compelling and relevant even within our obscure bracketed band of subcultural spectra... I propose to chart this narrow multiplicity as best I can... with a little help from my friends...
...
If you don't like philosophy, skip over the texts and go straight for the pictures. No harm done, perfectly understandable, no shame, you won't miss a thing, there's plenty left to take in. We're artists, first and last, so all theory aside, what's most important is the encounter with the work itself, or rather, in this medium, its infinitely reproducing copy.
Reading/writing hey? Acquired taste or lexical disorder, I'm not sure which, but once you have the word virus, the textual tapeworm, it's gotta be exercised, kept fed and entertained... you know who you are, and if so, exactly what I'm talking about. Clearly you're reading still, in which case, press onward intrepid traveler...
Text submissions are drifting in slowly from our multi-modal contributors - articulations considerably more lucid than my own - these can be found here.
Otherwise, for real, unless you really really really enjoy language, it's okay just to look at the pictures and listen to the sounds. Collections of improvisational recordings by several experimental electroacoustic projects can be found here. Click the large bold project titles to lead to private pages, where the handy Box.net widget should offer to play or download sample tracks. Or download full album zips from the smaller links indicated.
...
The inaugural spring'08 collection is found here, and also appears listed at page left. Each of the featured artists' pages contain one or more image galleries. These really are the golden fruit of this site - all the best meat is available here. Further collections will be added as they arrive. Update notices will appear in the blog, or you may contact the doyen to be added to a mailing list.
Galleries are displayed using the easy-to-use and free-to-download JAlbum and the Bananalbum plugin -- even the spinning banana will grow on you. Respect to sharewarers, always.
Collections of topically relevant links and a weblog are also under perpetual development...
...
Please take time to enjoy the collections produced by these conspicuous talents.
Contact info for each artist featured can be found here.
Email doyen at bachelormachines dot org to comment or propose submissions.
Paypal donations, easily made through the buttons marked, would be graciously appreciated ---
...
Many thanks for the generous participation of artists here and everywhere.
All culture is participatory
Let inspiration move you....
Eadem Mutata Resurgo
All my relations
-SWC, Vancouver BC,
Bachelor Machines inaugurated Feb 29 2008.
....
STATEMENT OF COLLECTIONS - SWC
STATEMENT OF INTENTIONS - BMO
STATEMENT OF SPECULATIONS - SWC
...
IM Collaborative Drawing, an affiliated project which I steward, remains a permanent if languishing interest - those collections, featuring the participation of scores of talented local artists and non-artists, re-appears here...
* We claim no exclusivity on the artists or their material, and all conjectural information presented is entirely opinion of its author, and does not pretend to represent the positions of the artists. Collection, commission, and general inquiries should be directed to the artists individually. All reproduction rights are implied, remaining absolutely the property of their creators... Though presently unaffiliated, SWC does carry something of a torch for the Intermission Artists Society - alas, she remains dormant since we induced cryo-sleep in 2006...
**"Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art." -Philip Galanter - I am lending latitude to this definition by including drawing practices which emulate or simulate symbiogenetic forces, involving aleatory permutational dynamics in the construction of the work.
MORE
