The rhizomatic French theorists Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Felix Guattari (1930-1992) have given us an explanation of the machinic as a fundamental operating principle of the rhizome's event-structure. For Deleuze/Guattari, being is machinic and the discrepancy between organisms and machines must be broken down into a comprehensive concern with production. In short, for Deleuze and Guattari, there is no difference between the category of the living and the machine in their epistemology modeled on the rhizome.

In that cybertheory is particularly concerned with the way in which the boundaries between human bodies and machines are being transgressed, Deleuze/Guattari's machinic propositions are increasingly meaningful, and thus under discussion within certain sectors. For example, the convergence of the machinic production of desire, the rich potential of technology-induced dream states, the aesthetic ability of art to re-simulate machinic perception, and the lapsing efficacy of non-machinic energy is implicated throughout the exhibit "1 monde reel" (1 Real World) at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (from June 30th to November 14th, 1999) and its extenuation onto the web at http://www.fondation.cartier.fr. Indeed, there are several rhizomatic/machinic propositions and arguments within arguments to be discerned in 1 monde reel, along with subtle questions behind the axiomatic proposals concerning mechanical/bodily transport.

1 monde reel, which was conceived of by Herve Chandes, suggests that the link between "the real" (the frenzied relegation of all aspects of life to "value" and "meaning" that more or less sums up bourgeois society) and the machinic imagination/desire of subjectivity (even if stemming from the warehouses of Nintendo, Silicon Graphics, and SONY) of the machinic body (even if it is less a matter of chimera than an issue of amplification) resides in the productivity of computer-robotics. This is first exemplified by a brilliant mobile installation of Rolf Fehlbaum's extensive toy robot collection which was created by Diller + Scofidio, an architecture and exhibition design studio from New York.

Circulating on automated rolling lanes (in and out of various views) within a vast, multiple-forked, video surveillance zone enclosed in transparent plastic is Fehlbaum's extensive accumulation of toy robots from the 1950s to the 1980s. This robo-operative anthropomorphic roll-up suggests to me a narrative tension between posthuman subjectivity and the automated spectacle as a pre-programmed precision performs inflexible automated opperations on Fehlbaum's robot collection. This yields a wonderful intellectual aftermath. By dramatizing connections between retro-futuristic style and computer-robotics, Diller + Scofidio + Fehlbaum draw on the euphoria of machinic make-believe (with its timeless passions and sleepless obsessions) but Diller + Scofidio + Fehlbaum also = a less euphoric (but horridly fascinating) sublime cogency for techno-selfhood in lieu of the info/robomation age where surveyed selfdom has become (supposedly) non-problematic in postindustrial settings.

Indeed, through Diller + Scofidio + Fehlbaum's apparatus, many intelligent visceral questions are raised concerning the productive interface between body/mind/machine/culture. For example, should belief in the bodies "obsolescence" be theorized as automated cultural enervation or as a refutation of technocratic domination because the intractability of the flesh is no longer so pivotal an issue when the flesh is no longer the exclusive grounds for machinic subjectivity? However one may choose to anticipate that question, clearly Diller + Scofidio + Fehlbaum's incessant machinic circulation suggests that one challenge of the new computer era, with its round-the-clock time zone, is dealing with a shift away from soley sensual definitions of being via a rather monolithic and repetitious vision of the machinic - a vision/aesthetic of the machinic which seems to hover over the exhibition as a great truth that cannot be questioned but only tampered with.

This rather monolithic understanding of the machinic (clearly at odds with Deleuze/Guattari's vitalisticly open proposition) was encouraged by the pairing of Diller + Scofidio + Fehlbaum's mechanical robotic go-round with the other dominant piece in the show - Chris Burden's massive "Medusa's Head" (1990). "Medusa's Head" is an autocratic industrial planet covered completely by a web of miniature train tracks which get swallowed up into tunnels and loop over tiny aqueducts. Again we have the in-and-out playhouse automated and made sententious.

In attempting to overcome this monolithic understanding of the machinic I applaud Herve Chandes exploration of this issue of contemporary machinic time/space by extending 1 monde reel onto the web at http://www.fondation.cartier.fr. Indeed, this site is exemplary of the way in which art spaces may best utilize the web in enhancing their grounded, off-line exhibitions. Here Matthieu Manche plays with the idea of a virtual fashion show in lieu of mutation, Gai Gua-Qiang presents documentation on "Projects for Extraterrestrials" and Valery Grancher presents her project "Longitude 38*": - a project based in a lunar crater. Singaporean artist Gwek Bure-Soh also explores machinic issues of vision through the use of quick cams.

If in cyberspace our ontology drifts vis-a-vis how personal subjectivity was once recognized, 1 monde reel's central oscillating idea of a machinic post-industrialization which imploded the real into the imaginary leads us right up to that mercurial cyber-hypothetical assertion in the air today that straightforward physical embodiment of subjectivity and machinic dis/re-embodied of subjectivity through machine assistance/circumvention are no longer two kinds of mental spaces but only one: the one real world. Might it be that by entering the repetitions of the Deleuzeian/Guattariian desiring machine the subject is dissolved in the swirls of repeats which at the same time further license subjectivity through an extension of motorized possession and transcendental mechanisms? In the machinic sense of subjectivity, 1 monde reel carries the intertwined dimensions of the symbolic and the functional. Therein lies the potential of long-term subjective change through the machinic, a change which will undoubtedly have multitudinous implications in an age where every user may become a server to all other users.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261 boulevard Raspil, 75014 Paris, France