LI-MA’s library brings together a growing collection of publications by artists, collaborators, and scholars working across media art and digital culture. Through this series, we occasionally highlight titles from the shelves that continue to inform, question, and expand these discussions. We came across 'Liberate the Machines!' by Joost Rekveld, a book that a reminder that machines are never just objects in the background, but are part of how we think (and that thinking keeps changing).
The book grows out of Rekveld’s artistic research and the making of his film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59, where analogue computers, historical simulation techniques, and long-outdated electronic systems are reactivated and worked with rather than simply studied.
What follows is less a technical account than a slow shift in perspective: from machines as tools to machines as part of a wider, collective construction of knowledge. Rekveld traces how working with “old” technologies opens up unexpected forms of learning.
The publication moves between media archaeology, mathematics, and the material histories of computation, but stays grounded in practice: building, testing, observing, and letting systems respond in ways that are not fully controlled in advance.
From the official blurb of the book:
The official blurb of the book goes as follows:
“Our technical milieu is a collective product, a long-term external memory to which each generation contributes. We cannot act or think without it, and the design and development of our technology is therefore a form of politics that shapes our life-world, our planet and ourselves. During this project, media archaeology became an approach to investigating this collective construction. Conversely, it led to an understanding of films, installations, talks, and writings as small gestures that may contribute to shaping it."
https://www.joostrekveld.net/?p=2781
Joost Rekveld has been active internationally since the 1990s, with films screened worldwide and retrospectives at venues including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Barbican in London, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His practice moves between experimental cinema, technology, and research, often exploring the meeting points between the arts and the exact sciences.
Alongside his artistic work, he has taught in a range of contexts focused on interdisciplinary practice. Since 2017, he has been affiliated with KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent as an artistic researcher.
A selection of his video works is available in the LI-MA catalogue.
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