The Body of the Buddha: On Device Art By Venus Lau Introduction The standpoint that marks the trace

of development of contemporary art, as stated by Alain Badiou, is one of how not to be Romantic, or more precisely, how not to be formalist-Romantic (1). Art is no longer a sublime abjection of an infinitude of pursuit for new aesthetic forms, but is rather the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction (2). Seemingly, the art industry has been speeding in total opposition to Badiou's definition: the ceaseless production of art forms that varies from dimension shifts to new materiality and communicability has continued to emerge throughout the past decades. However, despite the limitless assemblages of art in new forms, many of them possess a newness that is not futurea future that is emancipated from the horizonbut a predetermined, almost messianic present or past that comes too late. What matters is actually conceiving of new possibilities that are not possible to be calculated, instead of realizing existing possibilities. This claim finds its reflection in media art, or say in the attitude towards media in media art, particularly obvious in device arta relatively green genre in the media art circlethat gives rise to new possibilities for old and new art forms through ideas like mass production, uselessness, anti-production, and the concept of body, which radiate in their own crystallization, demonstrating new ruptures of pure creations (3) instead of sequences of purification that come to an end (4). As device art is still in a status by which epistemological and historical definitions remain clouded, this essay aims at examining a number of device art works with a focus on Buddha Machine (Buddha Box) by Chinese music and art group FM3, while looking at the possibility it induces in the field of artistic perception and circulation. This essay also investigates into the beginning and background of the genre. A phenomenon worth noting is the parallel evolution of device art that has occurred in both Croatia and Japan, with the former turned into a significant scene centered on an art festival at Zegrab dedicated to the genre while the latter has showed a more obvious blurring between the boundary of design and art, art objects and common products, toy and art piece. Although the device art scenes in the two countries on different sides of the world share some attributes in common, for instance, playfulness and the use of hardware, which demonstrate similarities between the art works from the two circles, yet the two sides' definitions of the artistic category vary. Director of Transmediale, art historian, and curator Andreas Broeckmann even commented the difference between the works from the two developments as exactly opposite (5). Although the Croatian device art offers interesting traits of the genre, this essay's investigation into the delimitation of art genre is based on the comments of Japanese device art scholars Machiko Kusahara and Hiroo Iwata, with an effort to analyze the qualities of certain art piece that will be able to further demarcate the possibility of this category. Demarcating the chronology of device art would be a hard task. For its commencement, it is generally accepted that device art emerged or was recognized as a new art genre in 2004, when Japanese Machiko Kusahara coined the term. Although she sees device art as a logical extension (6) or alteration in the conception of art in the 20th century as manifested by art

movements including Dadaism and Surrealism. This view tallies with the comments on device art by media archaeologist, curator, and writer Erkki Huhtamo. In his essay Proto-Device Art: A Western Perspective, he notes that the ground for proto-device art can be traced back to 19th century, when contemplation on how change could be induced by industrialization to art production occurred, resulting in three new types of man-machine relationship in art production: the machine as something worth representing (7) as a symptom or token of the technological (and perhaps also spectacle) society; machines as be the means to make art, suggested by the Futurists, who were obsessed with the aesthetics of precision and speed; and machines as art. The last notion significantly paved the road for contemporary device art as it gives the ground for hardware, which is the body of device art work. Huhtamo states that Brion Gysin is the pioneer of proto-device art for his Dreamachine, a cylindrical stroboscopic flicker apparatus. The device rotates at a certain speed (78 or 45 revolutions per minute) that manipulates the number of pulses formed by the patterns of lights coming through the holes on its columnshaped body. The audience is supposed to view the work with their eyes closed and enter a hypnagogic state. Dreamachine engenders visions with an absence of the viewers' vision. Lszl Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator (1922-30) is a machine with an architectural form which provides the possibility to study light and movements in space. The machine is formed by parts with geometric shapes or, to be more accurate, looks like a pile of metal pieces of various shapesbe it circles or rectangleswith negative spaces, arranged in the manner of a compressed Alexander Calder sculpture. The art piece sized 120 x 120 cm, with a circular opening on its front side. More than 70 light bulbs of various tones (yellow, green, white, and so on) are installed on the back of the panel around the opening, another panel is ensconced parallel to the front side of the sculpture or device. The light bulbs irradiate the moving mechanism (the geometric shapes) built with materials of different transparency, delineating the movements through positioning lights and shadows. These works, among others mentioned by Huhtamo as proto-device art, may not fall squarely into the definition of device art, but they still provide an epistemological dimension that raises the possibilities of such a kind of art. The above claims or characteristics appear to be too ambiguous as a consolidated definition for an art genre that can be easily mixed up with the conceptional core stones of other art forms including robotic art, a broader genre that harbors the works The Writer, made of more than 6000 pieces by Pierre Jaquet Droz, and Edward Ihnatowicz 's Senster (1969-71), which emphasizes the use of artificial intelligence as well as the relationship between the work and the viewer in the aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, device art's footing as a category is firmer than this; to clarify the concept, there are several keywords that should not be overlooked: self-contained, mass production, body, and uselessness. Like a young bird just out from its shell with bones and wings still tender, the genre of device art breaks through boundaries including the ones between design and art and between common commodity and art objects. In device art, the word device expresses equal significance with the word art. Provided with the common understanding of the word, device is understood as an apparatus which is designed and produced for a certain purpose. Kusahara provides a more detailed elaboration on this conception, noting that device art

is a hybrid of art and technology, where hardware is involved, while the involved can be exclusively designed for specific artistic practice (8). TenoriOn, produced by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai, who was awarded the 1998 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, exemplifies this notion in the form of a sound device that is mass-produced and marketed as a tool for sound performance. The work appears as a matrix of 16 x 16 LED switches; when a performer interacts with the square-shaped electronic sound plate, they touch the switches that respond with illumination and sound. When different glowing patterns are drawn by the performers' finger tips, an audio narrative of rhythms and tones transforms visualizations into audio output through the machine's instant response to tactility. Apart from exclusively designed mechanical creations, device art work can also contain hardware constituted by ready-made electronic gadgets through techniques including circuit-bending, physical computing and hacking. Hong Kong composer and media artist Samson Young created a series entitled Machines for Making Nothing (2011-ongoing) in which he put together readymade electronic parts including touch screens. Triumph of the Spectacle is one of the remarkable units of the series, formulated physically and mainly with a battery and a small touch-screen. When the viewer's finger tip arrives at the mirror-smooth screen, the line Triumph of the Spectacle comes up in multiplicity (in the sense of quantity and hues) as fingers slide across the reflective surface, forming a colorful curve of the same texts lined up over each other on the palm-sized black screen through simple computer coding. The art work's title obviously displays the artist's resolution to break away from the convenient ready-to-hand human-machine relationship based on functionality, while on the other hand he explores the economic and corporal connection between humans and machines via the simplicity of aesthetics and mechanical structure. One paradoxical trait of device art is the vagueness that defines its boundaries: Kusahara refers to the category as one with an absence of clear border between art, design and entertainment (9). This idea is further fortified by Hiroo Iwata, associate professor of the Institute of Engineering Mechanics and Systems in University of Tsukuba, who is also a device artist. Iwata contributes to the establishment of the genre via emphasis on the inseparability between the content and tool of an art piece (10) and the possibility of commercialization of the involved art pieces. He embodies these thoughts in his works, including Robot Tiles (2009), a set of squares covered with touchsensitive conductive fabric. When the audience walks on the textile-covered cubes, they simultaneously sense the movement on them, interpreting their movement and repositionong to form paths beneath the person walking on them. The work realizes a mechanic fantasy that combines the smiling clouds in Marioland and the beauty of precision and delicateness performed through human-machine interactivity that bears resemblance with the animation Ghost in the Shell. In the long history of human industrial invention, there are always reasons for the inventions of machines after their usefulness and functionality are produced. Some of them supersede alienated human labor with a process of quantification and hence a higher precision. The sewing machine makes a good example for this replacement and acceleration, and its outer appearance actually speaks for this fact: its horizontal arm acts as a calculated mechanical abstraction of a flexed arm, while the presser foot and feed dogs actually

imitate or imagine the movement of the hands and fingers that lead the thread undulating through the fabric. On the other hand, some other members of the mechanical family actually connect humans with their own impossibility in the form as a strengthened extension of a human part, or being with the tool-inhand, which can be seen in the cranes. The consumption of it, either culturally or economically, actually refers to itself. In our common, everyday practice, every device serves a purpose, even for device art. Kusahara believes that device art involves hardware exclusively designed to realize an art concept. However, even though device art is associated with such an artistic purpose or even mission, this purpose remains within the aesthetic aim that folds up and keeps referring to art as the master signifier every time when the piece is encountered by an audience, or a viewer. Device art is useless, as it does not involve the designation of specific utility to the contrivancethough some people may find some device art useful. Taking Buddha Machine (2005ongoing), or Buddha Box in some contexts, produced by Chinese music and art group FM3 in 2005 as an example, although some audiences or collectors find the plastic box that plays the loops by FM3 to be a good audio-aid for meditation, the device does not have any specific use-value that is objectively determined in a Marxist sense. Social use value does not exist in it. The comments made by the New York Times made a interesting comment about it: beautifully useless. This uselessness assures one of the attributes of the genre with its negativity. Apart from a more Marxist-economic aspect, the usefulness lacked by device art can also be examined in a Heideggarian sense: it lacks readiness-to-hand, as people are not able to find it useful without theorizing it, and there is no definite equipmentality to be revealed. This situation emerges not because of the innovation of the device, but through the absence of a certain, designed utility of the invention. Thus the potential usefulness of device artwhich is occasionally marketed as a commodityis purely empirical, though at times guided by the concept and adopting art form decided by the artist. Some may argue that inventions like Chindogu shared the same type of uselessness with device art. Chindogu are unique Japanese inventions that became known along with the publishing of the book 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu and also the promotion of amateur Japanese inventor Kenji Kawakami, the founder of International Chindogu Society. The wide collection of inventions of absurdity includes hundreds of brainchildren exclusively designed for particular usage that are usually unwanted: mini-fans installed on chopsticks just for achieving ideal temperature for a mouthful of noodles, glasses with small funnels for people who find application of medical eye-drops difficult, or a hat with a fixture for tissue paper on it, just for flu victims with runny nose. These inventions may be considered useless by most people, but this is not the same case with device art. Chindogu are still useful as long as a specific utility is attached to the designed objects: they are actually useful but not used. The concept of body pervades device art. It is easy to understand this claim that the use of hardware, or, in other words, apparatus, binds a body to a device artwork, which is compatible with Kusahara's explicit comments that a device is the body of the artwork. Hiroo Iwata further confirms the significance of the body of device art with the line The device itself is the content (11), which acts as a heritage of Marshall Mcluhan's slogan the medium is the message (which still remains a maxim of some media art scholars). Just as Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the effects of television as an

invisible structure by emphasizing the eye-catching, overwhelming news images taking over the real in journalism, as well as the invisible structure and symbolic order in the modification of media forms to social behavior, device art's device is something far more than the physical component or content of the art work. The body of device art is more complicated than this, as it is not only the physical object that takes up space considered to be a neutral void intended to be filled with artistic concepts and imagery, but also the conceptual body constituted by the physical and mechanical parts, imaginary operation of its mechanism, its message or content, its form, and the physical and emotional experience induced by the device. One example that can explain this is Maywa Denki's Bitman, a small, stylishly white cube with a monitor showing a simple LED human figure glowing in warm orange color. The viewers or audience are supposed to carry Bitman with them, as the sensors installed in the device transform the movements of the carrier of Bitman into movements or, more precisely, dancing motions of the figure on the LED screen, with the intensities of movements between the two (viewer/ LED human figure) displayed in a proportionate manner. In this case, not only the physical LED sign board and the white plastic cube constitute the body of the work, but also the active interactions, emotional investments, perceptive reception of mobility of the lights, the distance of viewing the work, the mechanism of the device and movement of the little LED man are enclosed under the totality of the conceptual body of device art. A debate may come up against this equation between a conceptual body and device art: one may argue that easel art, an accumulation of lines and shades on a physical plane, can be counted as possessing a conceptual body, as the paintings are painted on a physical planebe it canvas or paper, or even bamboo sticksbut they also provide a certain perceptive specialization, for example, how it forces the audiences to consume the alterity of the face of an image visually from a passive distance. This argument sounds reasonable and plausible, but, in other art formsalong the line of wide varieties from painting to video artthe body or the physical media of these art forms is imagined to be considerably inseparable from the content. A painting enters the viewer's perception as an image, although the paintings adheres to the materiality of their media, however it is consumed and experienced in a form where seemingly the body of the painting can be dissolved in vision. Derived from the concept of body, device art also has the characteristic of being self-contained, even though usually an interaction or stimulus from the audience or artist is required to activate or bring forth the body of the device, like installing batteries and pressing a button to initiate movement. The quality of self-containment does not lie only in the totality of the mechanical-empirical metabolism of device art, but also exists in relation with the space and site of its exposure, or in other words, exhibition space. Sometimes a decidedly thin line is found between installation and device art in this sense, and it is very tempting to mix up Michel Duchamp's Rotative plaques verre, optique de prcision (1920) or other (kinetic) sculpture with device art. Another case study is Peter Flemming's Stepper Motor Choir, showing twelve stepper motors with glass panels which produce ringing sounds when rotating and turned to be amplifiers, the tone of the sound fabricated here can be manipulated through the speed of the motors. The custom-made mechanics and modified solar engines constituting the work with no doubt create a possibility for beauty of precision and control, however, it is not self-contained for the work's recourse

to its immediate surroundings and also the negative space adjacent to the artifact, which puts it in the situation of being flattened and collapsing in the perceptive, in its appearance of a free-standing form, it leans its existence heavily on the negative space which it corrupts and cooperate with its surroundings, and where coordination and sensual/cognitive mappings occur. Artist Jessica Field's Maladjusted Ecosystem acts as a demonstration of mechanical life, involving four robots each concentrating on particular desires: seeking for light, drawing a line, searching for marks, and emitting light, all of which is confined to the spheres of activities that are linked by sounds, lights, and other signals. All the mechanical components of this project are designated and designed to achieve dual tasks, for instance, to look for the highest concentration of light while transmitting an audio signal. The quality of the two-sided explores the imitation of life, and on the other hand shows a contained system in which the devices, the production process, and the outcome constitute the self-contained body of the work. This is an explicit example of this particular quality, which offers ontological differences between device art and other art forms. Maladjusted Ecosystem exemplifies and embodies the quality of the self-contained in device art. This nature can borrow imagery from Gilles Deleuze, who showed no interest in domestic animals and their relationships with human beings but expressed particular interest in spiders and ticks, particularly in how these small living creatures react to a remarkably limited number of stimuli. Just like the above-mentioned small insects that expose themselves to a world of abstractions, device art also marks its own territories with designated movements in their designed bodies with emission of signs or traces (including the sounds and images produced in their body and movements). Territorialization comes after the vector of leaving the territory (12), which can be seen as the symbolic death inherent in the body and operations of device art. Every art work has its face, an alterity of its ideal image, and, though some may call it genuine or original, this face is never exposed to the nuisance of physical conditions, be it a furious fire or the sharp edges of a dagger. It remains in its predetermined eternity. The enclosed does not mean that it is closed to any kind of interpretations, but as its movements and device art are considered to be part of its corporeal components, it is not consumed just as an image or the face of art which is always referred to as the original state of any artwork that goes through sublimation to eternity despite its physical condition. For device art, the body of univocity is self-contained even as it also contains its own death, contained in its own destructive birth while exposing itself by unfurling the duration of its own body. It is almost like performance art, which stages pure gesture while neither struggling to the end nor ends without means. It is a means without an end that needs only sustaining and supporting the only difference is that, unlike the transient singular in performance art, the life or death in the body (the physical component, the mechanic operation, the predetermined control and response, the sensual experience induced) comes in an enclosed circle in the form similar to dice-throwing. Killing Buddha, a collaborative project between FM3 and art collective Staalplaat Soundsystem, shows more than a thousand white Buddha Machines being mutilated by acid applied to their circuits. Inspired by the line Meet Buddha, kill Buddha drawn from Zen monk Lin Ji Yixuan of the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), the work was installed in RAM (Radioartmobile) in Rome. In this work the audience witnesses

how the life of the Buddha Machines is worn down to malfunction due to the erosion and interruption on the circuit of the device. Although Killing Buddha falls into the category of installation, it reveals the symbolic death inherent in the mechanism and body of device by inducing the actual death of it. Mass production is considered an important feature of device art. Although device art may not all be molded and fabricated under a Fordist-style production line, the possibility of being mass-produced is relevant to define it as a genre. In the post-Duchampian art world where a ubiquity of framed images of Campell soup cans can be seen, people are very used to the merging of mass production with art work, most of the time in the form of a direct criticism on the alienation under capitalist production modes and commodity fetishism, which swaps the relations between people or labor with a plane demarcated with symbolized values in objects, or protest against some specific international corporations believed to be the culprits of the flattened world resulted from globalization. As a socio-political theme, mass production is manifested in works blooming in various forms, from Edward Burtynsky's Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China (2005) to Flooded McDonald's (2008) by Superflexa visualization of a humorous yet violent revenge on a life-sized set duplicated from the international fast food chain. Surprisingly, the prevalence of mass production, either in the form of a metaphorical sword towards the capitalist unjust or just a cooperation with factories, seldom turns out to be a mass-produced good. The Louis Vuitton bags designed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami may be seen as one rare example, but it is more often considered a by-product of images produced in the visual economy of the art industry. The art world forgoes the pre-modernist obsession of an aura based on the empowerment of the artist's labor input in the form of a signature or naminginstitutionalized in the form of a certificate of authenticityand common multiplicity of work editions and copies, showing that the image and representational value threatens to replace the original. This multiplicity gets along with the Baudrillardian second order of simulation and production where the walls between pre-industrial original and replicas are dismissed or even dismissive, but a belief in the reality of the real still exists and is shown in variations in market values demonstrated in different prices of different editions of a single work. On the other hand, the possibility of mass production in device art upholds the presupposed homogeneity of the multiple art commodities. The brutality of automatic, mechanical production of device art questions the Kantian aesthetic sublimethe disinterested pleasure where no desire is induced in the subject in viewing the artand other transcendental values superimposed on art objects which crowned the physical object of art with symbolic values. Kusahara and Iwata stress the playfulness of device art and made a remark about this quality frequently linked to Japanese culture. Playfulness may not necessarily be an attribute of device art in my opinion, but I agree with the connection between playfulness and Japanese culture with manifestations in the forms of manga and playful inventions like the girlfriend-lap pillow. This attitude towards objects can be traced back not only to the history of development of Japanese animation industry and product designs flooded with Kawaii-ness and personifications of dancing animals and singing objects in the last century, but can also be referred to the traditional sensibility of mono

aware (pathos for things) since the Heian period and the emotion initiated by the objects one encounter, the two two opposites that results the same quality in the same culture are like the two different faces on the noh mask. As a common attitude to the whole paradigm of Japanese pop culture, playfulness may appear too weak in delimiting a universality in device art. One can never evade Maywa Denki when talking about device art. The art group was founded by Japanese brothers Masamichi and Nobumichi Tosa in 1993 under the name of a company, which is the same as the one established by their father in the past. Over the past years they have created an extensive series of art works, a considerable portion of which are musical instruments (Tsukuba Series) instilled with manga-style fantasy and absurdity. One of the recent examples is Otamatone, which looks like a cartoonized, personified quaver. When the performer presses the round part of Otamatone while pressuring the stem attached to the head to control the pitch, a sound similar to the humming of the theremin will be produced. Otamatone is one of the representatives for the playfulness found in Maywa Denki's works, and this is the reason why some may simply see them as toy manufacturers instead of serious artists. In fact, the group has produced several series of art works of artistic and conceptual significance, one of the most impressive collections among these works being the Naki Series (FishInstrument Series) that contains 26 pieces inspired with the idea combining fish and instruments or tools. One of the members of the series, Uke Tel, is constructed as a bird-cage-shaped machine with a shallow, wide plate as its bottom. Whenever the device receives a phone call signal, a needle will fall down into the plate where fish is swimming in itthe needle may or may not hit the fish below, as the brutal contingency and precision that may end up in a fatal event reveals another side of the cheerful, playful art group who appear on YouTube to demonstrates its toys. Maywa Denki's art matches strictly to the definitions and key words of device art, especially how they pushe the boundaries of the conception concerning uselessness and application of mass production in art, they push this focal point by marketing their art works as products, including the above-mentioned Bitman. Nicholas Stedman may not be a significant player of device art, but his work After Deep Blue (2007) reminds people of the cold IBM chess-player which beat Garry Kasparov at a match in 1997. Instead of explicating artificial intelligence which imitates the thought patterns of humans, After Deep Blue builds a more animal-human relationship with the viewers through its pursuit for human touch. It is in the form of device art that actually sees the future of a lower, easier threshold as a lot of open source platforms and software are available, of which the above-mentioned Arduino sets a good example. In addition, the availability of courses in physical computing and hardware fabricating by programs like ITP of New York University and the accessibility of small, flexible factories in countries like China endorse device art production with various possibilities other than just collaborating with established electronic or scientific corporates. The significance of device art is proven by the fact that Vague Terrain, a web-based digital art journal, produced an issue focusing on device art in 2009. Although Maywa Denki's production demonstrates a plausible example of device art work, their qualities just fit too well with the genre's, so there is not

much tension coming out from the combination. A switch to another device art piece would be worth trying, it has not only to match the characteristics of the genre, but also to reveal the possibilities of changes that may be brought forth by device art. In 2005, a small apparatus named Buddha Machine by FM3, a Beijing-based music and art group, was produced, circulated, and purchased like a contagious disease in the underground cultural circle in Beijing. The physical embodiment of Buddha Machine is a palm-sized plastic box anointed with the aesthetics of plasticity characterized by the mass-production located in Pearl River Delta and also the anti-high tech minimalism in Chinese underground cultural circle. The first-generation of Buddha Machine is packed with nine loops produced by FM3 in a sound chip, a built-in speaker, a volume control button, and a switch for changing loops. Buddha Machine involves several variations, including Buddha 1, Buddha 2, Gristelism (a collaboration with Throbbing Gristle), Chan Fang (Zen Chamber), and Short Wave of Bengal Bay, as well as its iPad and iPhone apps, yet it is seen as one single project. The conception of Buddha Machine's form came from a religious device that got popular among Chinese Buddhists in the past two decades, the changfoji, which literally means singing-Buddha-machine. This is a portable, batteryoperated machine which plays certain Buddhist mantras endlessly. It shares the similar notions of interpassivity with the Tibetan mantra-flags (13), which when breezes fluff them and they chant the mantra for the Buddhists while they are actively preoccupied by some other secular errands. Since 2005, FM3 generated several versions of the apparatus, including Chan Fang (Zen Chamber) that was released in 2005. It still has the appearance of the same plastic box with a completely different set of sound loops composed with and recorded with one of the oldest Chinese musical instruments, the guqin, and a button is added to let the audience change the pitch of the loops. Buddha Machine has turned into a phenomenon in the past few years, especially among people with a certain type of new-age, anti-occidental attitude. It has sold millions and has become one of the most sought souvenirs for those visiting the middle kingdom. Although FM3 claimed that they only consider Buddha Machine to be another form to release their music, just like how CDs and cassette tapes did in the past (14), the modest rectangular plastic body and mechanical circulations of Buddha Machine actually exemplify the genre of device art, a new form of art that has distinctness in its blurry boundaries with other art forms. Art always raises the questions of space, spatiality (even the one of time), and spatialization whenever an art work appears, even in digital forms. The request arises in forms of deposition of spaces in galleries and museums or even public space; in the form of representation of three dimensional spaces on flat planes (canvas mostly of the time) through the conception and techniques of perspective; in the form of space inherent in the art object, including the negative space in sculptures and the gestural space in films; and in the form of relations to other physical and symbolic systems, for example the system of images. There is often some ethos of simplified notions of space and site or place in art, where space is an objective, a white-box-like physical space yearning to be filled up with art works and in which place and site are nothing more than the immediate space of an art piece, which signed their names in a

specific space with its corporeal intervention. However, space and place are more than this, at least in art, where different stratum of spaces (without hierarchy) overlap and clash with each other. One may be reminded of artist Robert Smithson's dialectical conception of site and non-site, which explores art objects, their immediate surroundings, and their reference to the representational of geographical features and topographies. In his related works, Smithson stages a metaphorical shift that crosses two places, and between the two there is a dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it (15). This is where the dialectic between site and non-site resides. Device art is one with the potentiality of multiple bodies resulted by mass production, possibly circulated under the grids of globalization where the globe is actually absent (16); for example, Buddha Machines are sold, transferred, purchased, destroyed, played, and scattered in different places and spaces, encountered by different people or objects at different times. The multitude of device art's body forms a disseminated flow of presence and site, even when it is not an intentional object. The definitions of space and place by Michel de Certeau may offer some possible intersection with the special case of space and place in device art. He states that place is about the law of proper, it is an order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence, and it is also an instantaneous configuration of positions (17). It suggests a stable and static mapping of positions of certain elements. On the other hand, de Certeau's space involves fluid aspectsincluding vectors and variables and is an intersection of mobile elements (18). In de Certeau's own words it is produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximity (19). This is the self-contained body that wraps itself up in dicethrowing-like univocity. Taking Buddha Machine as an example, even when it is ignored when encountered, its body is still activated and hence a space is created, just like what de Certeau describes as caught in ambiguity of actualization (20), or what happens when a word is spoken. The fragmented spaces resulting from the corporeal multiplicity of device art are distributed in different temporal-spatial girds, but it does not mean that the body of device art is dissolved into contingent events that involved people's encountering of an object that is reduced to certain accepted qualities. Instead, these spaces are fragmented and submitted to an aesthetic of disappearance, with device art's partial absence of their bodies (as an outcome of mass-production or the possibility of mass production) from particular viewers. The space of device art has an imaginary transparencybetween various bodies of itmarked by the vanishing of the vanishing point (which is a heritage from the visual perception of perspectives, and the disappearance of it is form the cancellation of distance through technology, and hence there is a change in spatial perception) that may be similar to Virilio's concept or imagery of big optics (21). This pattern of spaces that rise from the body of device art is actually parallel to people's fragmented experience in objectswhich is neither getting trapped by the onto-theological universality supposed to be underneath the superficial objects in the world, nor being obsessed with the bodily quality of device art work including the relations that it make. In the world of art, or, more precisely, visual art, devices are usually cloaked in the images and movements of the art work. This does not mean that they are always invisible and being devoured by shadows, but they are seldom exposed

to the sphere of visibility of artistic discourses. For example, a cinema projector hides itself in the dark behind the viewers' gazes, and only the greatest mechanical enthusiasts would try to resist the seduction of moving images and track down the faint yet crisp sound of revolving machinery in the cinemas. Even in daily practice, the mechanism and body of machines are not inscribed in the empirical experience of sense: a production line manufacturing crackers is not supposed to leak any trace of it, as the only thing that can enjoy the rays of visibility is the final product. Though the device may often be the object of research for scientists, it is a specific context, and for most people in most fields they are simply noises, even when they are static and silent. Device art initiates a deposition of a crack in the existing mode of distribution of the sensible in art, a structure of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it (22). It is also the demarcation of spaces and times, or the visible and invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the and place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience (23). Usually in the existing distribution of aesthetics, the device is merely a shell, stage, or platform where the visible in art is presented; in some cases it is still seen by the audience, but, just like the canvas of easel art, machines and hardware in contemporary art suffer from the imaginary separation of the audiences who automatically erase them from their aesthetic experience even though the art piece relies on them physically. Device art opens a disjunction that allows machine to be visible, it does not appear as a muted sign on a flat surface to dance and sing, this act does not only make hardware and device and their operations visible in art, but also inscribes a sense community through the univocity of its body that includes its own mechanism, operation, looped movement, and induced experience to sing and dance in its own rhythm of dancing chorus (24), one of Plato's three ways of distributing the senses (the other two are the surface of depicted signs and the split reality of theater) (25), and thus shatters the usual auxiliary position of machines in art. Device art is characterized by the mutations in its operations, but these changes, instead of exposing themselves solely to the hands of contingency, are wrapped in the univocity of the imaginary totality of its body. This situation resembles the act of dice throwing. In his essay Steller Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze on the Dice-Throw, philosopher Ray Brassier comments on the theories of dice-throwing by Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou (26). The dice-throwing imagery (or action as an object) was borrowed from French poet Stphan Mallarm's poem Un Coup de Ds Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard ('A roll of the dice will never abolish chance') of 1897. Setting aside the criticism Badiou raise about the possible transcendence in the Deleuzian narrative on dicethrowing, there grows a sense of resemblance between Deleuze's notion on dice-throwing and the body of device art. When one throws a dice, the body of device art transforms the audiences into an automaton, just as Deleuze mentions: The imperative is to throw (27), when referring to dice-throwing as an event that carries out the distribution of singular points that constitute a structure (28). Although a dice throw forms multitudes of aleatory numerical outcomes, it does not abolish chance, and is in fact an affirmation of chance as a whole. Similarly, just like the numerical plurality, one has to note that the corporeal whole of device art is stubborn, although there is possible suspect of immanence of ontological transcendence. When one encounters a device art

piece, for example, Buddha Machine, its body is a smooth space where reacting is the imperative. When an audience encounters any sort of empirical experience, he or she can switch it on, bounce between different loops, leave the first loop on as long as possible, or just pass by it, choosing not to press any button on it, or even leave an empty glance on the plastic shell of the Buddha Machine. He or she may even throw it into a trash can, a big one. No matter what form of reaction is induced from the virtual, corporeal whole of a device art work, one has to react to be certain, just like a tick responding to the world or sphere of subtraction including temperature of warm-blooded animals passing by, the position and the speed of its object of food source, and so on. An audience reacts to the univocity of the body of a device art piece, being abducted by the univocity and enter into the process of auto affection of Buddha Machine as a whole, but not a monism. The viewer, whom is trapped by the varieties as a whole and a hole given by the device art piece, falls into the illusion of choosing and manipulating, and eventually is turned into an automaton that tries to equate the body of the device art work to his/hers. Although device art still remains circulated and articulated in a more limited circle of the art industry, its gradually increasing exposure starts to raise the awareness of people who are interested in the aesthetics of hardware and mechanisms in art works. Unlike some new media art forms, device art does not emerge with ambitious manifesto that declares the death of certain older art forms and the coming of a new epoch. In addition, in an age where limitless new forms of art are produced by capitalism, questions involving hyperreality, originality, labor in art industry, ontological and political significance of artistic practice have been frequently asked in the past few decades, device art does not bring answers for these questions with it, it just brings more questions, new questions, about sense, about body, about movements and some more. It is considered as one of the possible futures of art, not because it realizes some specific technological concepts that was dormant in people's imaginations in the past, but because it is just a present that comes too late. What it brings and what it asks is sometime totally invisible or even did not exist in the past, and this is what is called future. Note: (1) Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, Lacan dot com, (http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm). (2) Badiou,Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art . (3) Badiou,Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art . (4) Badiou,Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art . (5) Concept (of Device_Art 3.009), Kontejner.org, 2009, (http://www.kontejner.org/device-art-3009-koncept-english) (6) Machiko Kusahara, Device Art, a New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective, Intelligent Agent Vol. 6 no.2, (http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_pacific_rim_kusahara. htm ) (7) Errki Huhtamo, Proto-Device Art, a Western Perspective, kontejner.org, http://www.kontejner.org, 2009, (http://www.kontejner.org/proto-deviceart-english) (8) Kusahara, Device Art, a New Form of Media Art from a Japanese

Perspective. (9) Machiko Kusahara, Externalizing our body: device art and its experimental nature, Mutamorphosis, 24 February 2009, (http://mutamorphosis.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/externalising-ourbody-device-art-and-its-experimental-nature/) (10) Hiroo Iwata, What is Device Art?, http://www.deviceart.org/. (11) Iwata, What is Device Art?. (12) Charles J. Stivale, overview on the video interview Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer(with Claire Parnet) (L'Abcdaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet ), Foreign Language Technology Center , Wayne State University, (http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/cstivale/d-g/abc1.html). (13) Slavo Zizek, How to Read Lacan, the Inetrpassive Subject:: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel, Lacan dot com, (http://www.lacan.com/zizprayer.html ) (14) The writer's correspondence with Christiaan Virant from FM3 (April 30-May 10, 2011) (15) Robert Smithson, A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (from Unpublished Writings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd Edition 1996) , Robertsmithson.com, (http://www.robertsmithson.com/index_.htm ) (16) Bruno Latour, Some Experiments in Art and Politics, eflux Journal no. 23, March 2011, (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/217 ). (17) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California Press, 1984), 117-118 (18) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117-118 . (19) Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117-118 . (20) De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117-118 . (21) Paul Virilio, Big Optics, On Justifying the Hypothetical Nature of Art and Non-Identicality within the Object World, ed. Peter Weibel, (Colonge, 1992). (22) Jacques Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 12. (23) Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 13. (24) Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 14. (25) Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 14. (26) Ray Brassier, Steller Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze on the Dice-Throw, Pli, the Warwick Journal of philosophy, Vol. 10, 2000. (27) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) ,198 (28) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 198.