Industrial robots are designed to perform repetitive tasks with near-perfect precision. They operate without hesitation, exhaustion or loss of concentration. This is the mastery of automation, a synchronised symphony.
From Taylorism to contemporary artificial intelligence, the utopia of automation has spread and become widespread. Having transformed the world of industrial production, it has now taken hold of our thinking, our judgement and our memory.
This is the era of La Société Automatique (The Automatic Society), the title of a lecture by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler that describes the total automation of our lives. All areas of existence are merging into an invisible network of calculations; digital utilitarianism is replacing human decisions, imposing a logic based on efficiency that reduces our scope for action. Technology is becoming the invisible architect of our lives. A dystopian present, in which an education that critically engages with these opaque systems is key to ensuring a democratic reappropriation of technology.
The exhibition The Automatic Society reflects the unease of a post-anthropic world in which the human no longer occupies the centre and machines—Sisyphuses devoid of fatigue or rebellion—threaten to erase us. A universe of automatons that continue their cycles within a hermetic system, devoid of human purpose.
The Automatic Society is a co-production by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, iMAL, Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, Europalia and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
Artist: Félix Luque
Set design: Nel Verbeke