In 1910, Jakob Mohr, a farmer suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, illustrated the machine he believed his tormentors were using to control his thoughts. A radiation tube capable of both pulling electrical waves out of him and projecting hypnotic thoughts into his mind, this Influencing Machine was a “magnet as well as a gun.” Mohr’s drawing is not just one of the earliest artistic expressions of a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic experience, but also a metaphor for both making and viewing art—a means by which one consciousness is punctured by another.

The DESTE Foundation’s latest exhibition, Dream Machines, and corresponding catalogue of the same name takes Mohr’s image as one of its central works. As a historical survey of the intersection of art and technology, the show encompasses everything from a reproduction of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) to the humorous kinetic energy transference of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987) to Lee Bul’s augmented reality landscape of Willing to Be Vulnerable — Metallized Balloon VER.AR22 (2022), and much in between. Indeed, the exhibition and catalogue riff on the name of Brion Gysin’s famous Dreamachine (1959), a simple stroboscopic device used to induce alpha wave mental states similar to an acid trip. Gysin’s grand plan to patent and mass produce Dreamachines—he imagined them replacing televisions as home entertainment systems—never came to fruition, but his integration of science, mysticism, and art made a lasting impression: William Burroughs hailed the work as a means to “storm the citadels of enlightenment” and Genesis P’Orridge believed it replicated ancient shamanic experiences (see P’Orridge’s pirated 1986 Network 21 interview for a reenactment).

Installation view, Dream Machines, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, 2023. Photography by Pinelopi Gerasimou; courtesy of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Still, among all of these works, Mohr’s drawing acts as a kind of luminescent core: expressing, as it does, the uneasy relationship between art, humanity, and technology. As curators Daniel Birnbaum and Massimiliano Gioni put it in their introduction to the catalogue, “Technology creates utopian dreams. It also creates paranoia.” On the one hand, technology is a threat to autonomy and human expression, but it is also a promise of transhuman capabilities, communication, and interrelation. A magnet and a gun.

“And yet this show isn’t really ‘techy,’” Ben Livne Weitzman says in his discussion with the curators reprinted in the 224 page catalogue. “It has a mechanical, almost analog vibe.” In one part of the exhibition space, a light flickers erratically—pulsing to the beat of a gallery attendant pedalling a bicycle, whose generated energy sporadically powers the bulb of Maurizio Cattelan’s Dynamo Secession (1997/2023). The human hand behind the machine is laid bare, a vision of technology reminiscent of the Flinstones’s retro-futurism. Nearby, H. R. Giger’s Biomechanoid (Biomechanoid Portfolio, 4) (1969) imagines the fusion of the human and the machine. His silkscreen print depicts sci-fi innards with wires feeding out of a metal box and creating a circuit to a soft, fleshy organ, the aorta-like tubes of which are sliced open at the bottom, leading nowhere. The closest thing we have to an x-ray of Elon Musk’s cold heart, perhaps. Philippe Parreno’s video piece, The Writer (2007), makes use of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s 18th century automaton of the same name. Crafted to resemble a small child learning to use a quill and ink, the automaton is capable of writing any text up to 40 characters long. Parreno coded its mechanical wheels to copy out “What do you believe? Your eyes or my words?” and filmed its motions, cutting occasionally to interior views of the mechanical workings (alongside their strange whirs and clicks). Like Giger’s work, Parreno’s video merges the human and the mechanical—in this case, questioning our sense of reality and the seat of consciousness to revive this antiquated form of the surreal. Anicka Yi’s installation, Releasing The Human From The Human (2019) moves further into the realm of the uncanny, encasing animatronic insects inside kelp-leather lanterns, so that their mechanical wings brush eerily against their glowing cages. The exhibition is thus a vision of old futures and utopias, just as much as modern paranoias—an alternative history of unrealized dreams, methods that have fallen by the wayside, and our ongoing interest in taking the utilitarian and denaturing it, making it aesthetic. It’s that blurring and denaturing that Dream Machines captures so well—the moment when art and technology combine to create something closer to the fantastical (one need only see the exhibition’s H. R. Giger print, Anicka Yi installation, or Philippe Parreno’s video for proof here).

Installation view, Dream Machines, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, 2023. Photography by Giorgos Sfakianakis; courtesy of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.

There are moments of explosive inventiveness in human culture—the creation of the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, and the World Wide Web, to name a few—followed by decades where the possibilities of the latest technology is trialed, implemented, and slowly perfected. Those explosive phases remind us that scientific innovation is not a logical and linear progression and that its results are not obvious and predetermined, but rather an art form in itself requiring wild acts of imagination. Such moments are often accompanied by a blurring of disciplines, a renewed interest in the magical and fantastical as precisely the zone where our minds are free to think both artistically and scientifically, rather than either/or. There is, at times, even the whiff of the alchemical. As Michelle Kuo’s featured essay on the organization Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in Dream Machines points out, the late 1960s and early 1970s were just such a time. Drawing from extensive research on the activities of E.A.T., which started as a collaboration between artists in New York and the engineers and scientists at Bell Labs—leading, notably, to Carolee Schneemann’s performance piece Snows (1967), Robert Rauschenberg’s sound sculpture Oracle (1962–65), and Andy Warhol’s use of Scotchpak™ to create his Silver Clouds (1966)—Kuo makes a case for the possibilities that arise when technology is set free from utilitarian bounds, employed for the sake of imagination and cross-disciplinary experimentation. Art and technology need not be separated into “Two Cultures,” as the British physicist C. P. Snow argued, but allowed to intermingle and expand one another’s visions.

As in the ’60s and ’70s, we are once again at a moment of technological expansion, acceleration, and proliferation. And, as Birnbaum and Gioni put it, “At a moment when we can no longer imagine a world without technology, it is vital to ask how we (the inhabitants of this planet) imagine the world and its machines.” Birnbaum and Gioni go on to discuss the difference between physis (that which springs forth from itself) and techne (that which depends on human action in order to come into being)—a distinction that feels apt to both the exhibition itself and its contemporary context. Although AI only features in a handful of the works, its potential as a recent innovation is not lost on the curators, who point to Gaston Bachelor’s concept of phenomenotechnique (how phenomena are generated) in their discussion of the topic.

Installation view, Dream Machines, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, 2023. Photography by Giorgos Sfakianakis; courtesy of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.

When AI (techne) can hallucinate (physis, perhaps?), phenomenotechnique feels more important than ever. Inherent in the double meaning of the exhibition’s name itself is the question of not only how we imagine technology, but how machines shape our imaginations of ourselves and our futures, structuring and delimiting what we perceive as possible. Do we dream the machines, or do the machines produce our dreams? Dream Machines responds with a magnetic pull and propulsive release that seems fitting of our anxious times.