Bachelor Machines is an online curatorial project, exhibition space, and collegial fanzine assembled in Vancouver BC and territories imagined elsewhere by host organism and contributing artist Steve Calvert.

Bachelor Machines is a collection, but not a collective. It may yet begin to resemble one if cells cohere and differentiate. Artists presented appear at their invitation and consent, but are otherwise entirely independent and unaffiliated beyond a measure of personal acquaintance with the editor. *

Bachelor Machines' prerogative is to collect, display and promote artists working in or around the vague terrain of exploratory culture, in visual, auditory, textual, sculptural, social, architectural and performative domains.

Identifying in the round with a contemporary 'pataphysics, we engage an ongoing intermedia exploration on themes of feedback systems, generative processes, symbiogenic automata, chaoid anomalies, attractors of emergence, uncertainty, reflexive observation, and other concrete poetics - conceptual ludologies for articulating the abstract machine ... Narrowing the gates again, the editor expresses his preference for progressive strategies in abstraction; with special interest in radically minimalist and maximalist articulations of the episteme. ...

Bachelor Machines gathers and displays collections of images, texts, audio/video files, and references to existing work hosted elsewhere by artists addressing the sensibilities at interest -- 'an aesthetics of generative systems'; Functions; "bird of the eternal mechanism, brain in an intimate relationship with the qualities of machines" [Tzara, 1919]

In an effort to participate in and contribute to a speculative discourse on constructive feedback, conceptual abstraction, and 'pataphysical abstract machines which articulate the anomolous spectra of creative automata in a synechdoche of glocal culture, the discussion continues everywhere elsewhere, ambient and quietly simmering. The contemporary generative milieu is being explored not only in speculative visual art, sound, and philosophy, all emphasized here, but also finds real practical application in cognitive, computational, social, biological, architectural and engineering sciences. 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 construct some bridges...

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Collections have been accumulating since the inaugural launch in spring '08, and are found here. Each of the featured artists' pages contain one or more image galleries. These are the richest fruit of this site - all the best meat is available here. Further collections are being added as they arrive.

Galleries are displayed using the easy-to-use and free-to-download JAlbum with the Bananalbum plugin -- even the regrettable spinning banana has grown on us. Respect to the sharewarers, always.

Topically relevant links and blog entries are also in perpetual development... Update notices will appear in the blog, or you may contact the doyen to be added to a mailing list.

If you don't dig on speculative philosophy, please, skip the texts and go straight for the pictures. You won't miss a thing -- there's far more to see than my wandering tetual explications. 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... acquired taste or neuro-lexical disorder, once you have the word virus, the textual tapeworm, it must be exercised, 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 still drifting in from our multi-modal contributors, penning witty and insightful articulations considerably more lucid than my own. These can be found here. Otherwise, it's still okay just to look at the pictures and listen to the noises.

Collections of improvisational recordings by several experimental electroacoustic projects can be found here. Click the large bold project titles to lead to private pages. The handy Box.net widget should offer to play or download individual tracks. Also available are full album zips downloadable from the smaller links indicated below.

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Please take time to enjoy the collections..

Contact info for each artist featured can be found here.

Email doyen at bachelormachines dot org to comment or propose submissions.

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Many thanks for the generous participation of artists here and everywhere.

All culture is participatory

Eadem Mutata Resurgo

All my relations

SWC, Vancouver BC

Bachelor Machines inaugurated Feb 29 2008

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STATEMENT OF COLLECTIONS - SWC

STATEMENT OF INTENTIONS - BMO

STATEMENT OF SPECULATIONS - SWC

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* We claim no exclusivity on the artists or their material, and all conjectural information presented is entirely the opinion of its author, and does not 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 in induced cryo-sleep since 2006...

Intermission Collaborative Drawing, an society-affiliated project stewarded most actively from 2002-2006, remains a permanent if languishing interest. Those collections, featuring the participation of scores of talented local artists and non-artists, re-appear here...

**"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 lend metaphorical latitude to my definition by including drawing practices which emulate or simulate symbiogenesis events, involving aleatory permutational dynamics in the construction of the artwork - where the presence of the artist is a negotiating, rather than determining, factor....

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