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A Machine Aesthetic explores the various manifestations, uses and influences of mechanisation within the practice of a diverse range of contemporary artists.

From the first daubings of pre-historic caves, through the invention of the camera obscura and ready-made oil paint in tubes to the use of digital media, artists have been among the first to embrace and exploit new technologies. The focus of A Machine Aesthetic, however, is at once narrower and broader, concerning itself specifically with the notion and implications of ‘mechanisation’ in its widest sense in contemporary art.

Since the late 1950s/early 60s there have evolved a plethora of artistic practices that involve the manufacture of machines to produce the artistic ‘product’. Where Jean Tinguely led the way, artists as diverse as Rebecca Horn, Chris Burden, Roxy Paine and Damien Hirst followed. While earlier analyses have tended to conceive of the machine in a narrow sense, A Machine Aesthetic proposes a different perspective, achieved by consideration of the full range of artistic practices that embrace both subtle and sophisticated notions of mechanisation.