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Desire Machine arises from the need to replace the paranoid, capitalist, neurotic with schizoanalysis: a molecular, schizophrenizing point of view that sets free the autoproductive unconscious.

Rather than linking dependent parts into a functioning whole, desiring machines involve heterogeneous "parts" in a connective synthesis. The unconscious is a factory rather than a theater. The unconscious constructs machines, which are machines of desire, whose use and functioning schizoanalysis discovers in their immanent relationship with social machines.

The unconscious does not speak, it engineers. It is not expressive or representative, but productive. A symbol is nothing other than a social machine that functions within the social machine, an investment of the social machine by desire
recent works

Documentation and archiving the performing arts : Issues of Intellectual Property Rights - 4th to 8th May 2009 ...link

Issues of rights and ownership of cultural materials have been at the heart of documentation and audio visual archiving for many years. However in recent times, the advances in media, digitization and dissemination through the Internet have brought urgency to these issues in an unprecedented fashion.

IMAGINE PEACE ...link
KHOJ is collaboratively organizing a four-day workshop on theme of IMAGINE PEACE! A Visual Encyclopedia by Design2context, (Institute for Design Research at the Zurich University of the Arts) which works internationally to foster the idea of a new iconography of peace or non-conflict. The workshop organized by KHOJ and Design2context will be the fifth in a series of workshops that will have taken place by January 2009 in four different regions around the globe, where conflict and violence may vitally delineate the sociopolitical landscape – El Salvador, Brazil, Dalian, Colombia and most probably Ethiopia and Rwanda.
The workshops will result in a major publication titled, 'Imagine Peace': a visual encyclopedia of peace' with texts and image contributions from the artists as well as well known scientists, politicians, philosophers, politologists, etc.

Periferry 1.0... link

The project creates a forum for discourse on the notion of borders and explores an alternative imagination of cross-border transaction. It provides an alternative space, which is the impetus for transforming cultural productions on a ferry on the river Brahmaputra. It is a network space for negotiating the challenge of contemporary cultural production.

Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted... link

The project seeks to summon ‘false memories’ via the forest soundscape, invoking the idea that we ‘remember’ our earlier existence in any particular location, hypothetically once a forest, as beings not of the urban fold. read more...

PAD.MA event... link

PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. desire machine collective created an event on this archive by contributing footage. The footage deals with looking at Northeast India as imaginary colonial construct with multiple readings from a war- zone to a transnational imagination.
 

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The Landscapes of Where ...link

23 April - 27 May 2009

Curated by NANCY ADAJANIA
PRAJAKTA PALAV AHER
PRAJAKTA POTNIS
POOJA IRANNA
SONAL JAIN
MRIGANKA MADHUKAILLYA

Curatorial Concept Note

“This exhibition investigates the meanings of landscape in an age when the natural has been menaced or re-formatted by a triad of forces: media, militarisation, and surveillance. The landscape is no longer clearly designated by regional characteristics or specificities of cultural practice. It is a conceptual terrain, inscribed and re-inscribed by narratives reshaping it to their own purposes. The landscape, once the paradigm of location and belonging, is today a guarantee of uncertainty, disturbance, and disorientation. Thus, I arrive at my formulation of 'The Landscapes of Where', in relation to the work of five artists: Bombay-based Prajakta Palav Aher and Prajakta Potnis, Delhi-based Pooja Iranna, Guwahati-based Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain. How do they position themselves and reclaim the landscape in a time of radical dislocation?

Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya’s video poems achieve a memorable political meditation by relinquishing obviously political devices. Jain’s contemplation on an implied landscape transforms a streetscape in Guwahati into a riverine ecology, desiring the multiple flows of ideas, positions and confluences in a society wracked by violence. For Madhukaillya, abstraction provides a means of speaking the unspeakable: to voice the breath that is choked, to indicate the window that can never be opened, and if opened, will only confront you with the darkness within.”

- Extract from curatorial essay by Nancy Adajania
 

 
 

55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen ...link

Unreal Asia is a thematic programme of short films and video art from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, exploring the side effects, symptoms and traumas of the region’s post-colonial period. The programme will feature both historical and recent works focusing on the complexities of Asian experience.

What makes ‘real life’ real? Is the answer different in different places? In Southeast Asia, things taken for granted in the West – such as democracy, the individual or even history – can be little more than hypothetical. So what are the prevailing indices of the Real in this region? Family? Death? The State? Ethnicity, religion or language? Place and displacement? How do these things frame public and private memory, and how do moving images contribute to these framings?

The curators:

Gridthiya Gaweewong is Artistic Director of Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center. David Teh is a Bangkok-based critic and curator.