Emails

5 

   "Our emails provide the most complete history of Machine Project. When I started Machine, I told people through email about the events in the space, and since we described every event we ever did in an email, it’s also our most exhaustive archive. Eventually Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered additional ways to communicate, but email remains our primary method of talking with our audience. The emails go out on Tuesday, announcing what’s happening the upcoming weekend. They intersperse information on workshops, performances, exhibits, newly released videos, and poster sales with requests for volunteers and loans of equipment from shovels to lasers. Once or twice a year we send out a slightly desperate fundraising request. The voice of the emails is friendly, credulous, amused. Maybe a little scatterbrained. The emails transmit the sensibility and attitude of Machine out into the world on a weekly basis, and the style of the writing creates a context for our events. It may even be that the events we do at the space are driven by what would sound good in an email. We’ve certainly chosen particular projects because we thought the email would make people laugh. I aim to create an image for the reader of who is speaking to them, what kinds of people they might meet at Machine, and what kinds of experiences they might have.

   I wrote the emails in the beginning with help from Jason Brown. Over time a house style emerged, applied, modified, perfected, and mutated by Michele Yu, David Eng, Jessica Cowley, and Lucas Wrench, the operations managers between 2005 and the publication of this catalogue in 2016. Michele’s emails were blunt and funny and often involved pizza. David’s focused more on burritos. Jessica’s were upbeat and welcoming. Lucas tends towards a more baroque style, with bursts of cheerful nihilism and a weakness for references to troglodytes."

excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION

By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN

ideas

4 

   "A story or an idea can do the work that visual art does without even being seen by someone. This is one of my key beliefs about art: that it exists in human consciousness, and can take many shapes or forms. I created a piece with Emily Lacy, a concert for one dentist and one dental patient. We selected at random someone who would get a free dental cleaning while Emily would play relaxing and calming music. The piece was performed for just the dentist and the dental patient. You’re not reaching a giant audience when you do that, but you are creating a story. And if you think about art as something which changes our perception of the world, you don’t necessarily have to be there in person for that to happen. The mythology of a performance grows and resonates long after the action is over. 'A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.' — Joseph Joubert"

excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION

By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN 

three

3 

   "We are not trying to become any larger.  A metastasizing logic of the art world, capitalism, and life seems relentlessly invested in making things bigger, larger, more expensive, and more ambitious. Artists move from small galleries to large, organizational budgets show growth, sales numbers rise, ambitions swell, fundraisers raise more funds. What for? That a model’s validity is based on its capacity to scale up and eat the universe seems mindless. Every organism wants to live and spread out and reproduce, and yet the bigger you get, the less freedom you have to innovate and the more over head you have to maintain to stay alive. So the question for us isn’t how to get big, but what we can do that no one else can."

excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION

By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN

invisibility

2

   "I studied with Michael Asher at the  California Institute of the Arts (CalArts),  and although we had different aesthetics, I learned a lot from him. I loved how he would change one variable in a system to call attention to the invisible, like removing the wall between the gallery and office at the Claire Copley Gallery or creating a column of air in the Whitney Museum. Michael pointed out that the hallways and ceilings were as much part of the museum as the galleries, so that made me think the hallways and ceilings were a place to make work in, which became a central idea of our show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. By changing one thing, you can achieve something as simple as giving an audience another angle to investigate a topic or as complex as reintroducing everything that has been pushed out to make an institution function—like how the invisible workings of architecture construct history, power, and context."


excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN

Machine Project

1

   "When I first started I was doing a lot of work with technology, so I called the space Machine Project. Today I’m less interested in technology, but I still think it’s a good name. Now I say we’re a machine for making ideas; in come people, resources, context, and opportunities, and out go art, ideas, and philosophies about living in the world. Of course, if you stick around long enough, names stop meaning anything at all except what you are. Now Machine Project is simply the symbol in people’s brains for whatever it is we are."

excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN