Gallery: 10 Artworks From The New Museum's "Ghosts In The Machine" Exhibition

Image via Complex Original

Today marks the opening of "Ghosts in the Machine" at the New Museum in NYC, an exhibition that examines the shifting relationship between humans, machines, and art. Spanning over fifty years and seventy artists and writers, it includes both well-known and emerging figures, such as Richard Hamilton, Jeff Koons, Henrik Olesen, Hans Haacke, and Robert Breer.

As a whole, the exhibition displays artists' historically continuous fascination with technology and its implications for society. They foretell the present and future of machines as altering subjective experience, for better or for worse.

Highlighting moments in Optical art, Utopian art, and Futurism, the exhibition forms, as they've coined, "a prehistory of the digital age." People have always had a fascination with machines, and thoughts surrounding the experiential impact of them couldn't be more relevant.

Visit "Ghosts in the Machine," curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, at the New Museum on 235 Bowery in New York, New York, from July 18 through September 30, 2012.

Gallery: 10 Artworks From The New Museum's "Ghosts In The Machine" Exhibition

Above:
Stan VanDerBeek
(b. 1927 New York, NY–d. 1984 Baltimore, MD)
Movie-Drome, 1963—66/2012
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek

Stan VanDerBeek
(b. 1927 New York, NY–d. 1984 Baltimore, MD)
Movie-Drome, 1963—66/2012
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek 

Robert Breer
(b. 1926 Detroit, MI–d. 2011 Tucson, AZ)
Floats, 1970/2011
Resin, paint, electric motor, wheels
Each: 72 x 70 5/6 in (183 x 180 cm)
Recreated by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Museum Tinguely, Basel
Courtesy gb agency, Paris 

Unattributed
Reconstruction of the machine from Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” 1914
Realized in Ateliers des Grands Magasins Loeb SA, Bern (Werner Huck and Paul Gysin, in collaboration with Harald Szeemann) for the exhibition “The Bachelor Machines,” 1975—77, initiated by Harald Szeemann 118 1/5 x 78 1⁄2 x 39 1⁄2 in (300 x 200 x 100 cm) Collection Ingeborg Lüscher and Una Szeemann 

François Morellet
(b. 1926 Cholet, France. Lives and works in Cholet and Paris, France)
Random distribution of 320,000 squares using the π numberdecimals, 50% odd digit blue, 50% even digit red, 2012
Vinyl
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hervé Bize, Nancy, France 

Hans Haacke
(b. 1936 Cologne, Germany. Lives and works in New York, NY)
Blue Sail, 1964—65
Blue chiffon, oscillating fan, fishing weights, and thread 134 x 126 in (340.4 x 320 cm)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

Harley Cokeliss
(b. 1945 San Diego, CA. Lives and works in London, England)
Crash!, 1971
16mm Eastmancolor transferred to video, color, sound, 17:34 min
Courtesy the artist © BBCTV 1971 

Thomas Bayrle
(b. 1937 Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Frankfurt/Main, Germany)
Madonna Mercedes, 1989
Photocopy collage, dispersion on wood
78 x 57 1⁄2 in (198 x 146 cm)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Property of the Städelscher Museum-Verein 

Henrik Olesen
(b. 1967 Esbjerg, Denmark. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, 2009
30 computer collages: 12 1⁄4 x 8 3/4 in (31 x 22.5 cm) each; 6 text collages: 11 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 in (29.7 x 21 cm) Collection Kunstmuseum Basel. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne 

Richard Hamilton
(b. 1922 London, England–d. 2011 Oxfordshire, England)
“Man, Machine and Motion”, 1955/2012 Exhibition Reconstruction
Realized in collaboration with the Estate of Richard Hamilton