The Reign of the Machine is about the human surrender to digitalia after mechanization, the moment when automated tasks and practices finally asserted their dominance over the habits and routines of everyday life, when bar codes, RF ID, GPS and automated AI voice systems became transactional models for human practices, exchange and communication.
The Reign of the Machine, which was born with the Industrial Revolution, is about the ongoing and relentless economic and social transformation of the world by mechanization. In this two-tier post-modern model, machines are no longer solely dependent on humans to run and organize them productively because they have been replaced, to a great extent, by the products of the Information Revolution, computers, dedicated and specialized software and, at the extreme, artificial intelligence programs and systems which now inform and control the means of production to ever more specialized outcomes.
“With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.”
― Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine
“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”
William S. Burroughs
Songs
Circus Minimus (5:36) – The Fall (4:38) – Life Factory (5:04)
New Virus (7:14) – Raining Metal (7:27) – Reign of the Machine (5:26) – Rising Power (4:44) – Trans Mission (6:06)
“As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.” Ernst Fischer”
All Codec 13 compositions by Pierre Ouellet & Jim MacDonald
Published by Venture Publishing (2019)
Recorded, mixed and mastered at Venture Studio Toronto (2019)
Album Art and Design by Catherine Piro
Original cover image by Paul Young.
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
B. F. Skinner
