ON GOOD MACHINES

"Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena."

Wilhelm Reich

Almost everything begins with a line. As a life unfolds, a simple line becomes a complex drawing. Filled up with personal symbols and meanings, these drawings become maps of one's mind, evolving into structures, growing into architecture and conquering the space. The leap of an idea from the thinking mind into the world of objective reality is one of the most mystical and dramatic moments in the process of artistic creation. The draft  is transformed into "flesh" of a sculpture or architecture that we can experience with our senses, and acquire into our world and, by that action, we can trust this event that intruded our reality, judge it, give it a place, believe in it.

My latest works are entitled "Accumulators of Good Energy" or simply "Good Machines". Those are a logical and, at the same time, opposite sequence to another, precedent series of "Torture Machines", from the mid 90's, which I projected and actually never realized (which wasn't anyway the idea). These drawings were just a suggestion of a mechanical motion, that had no logic, but they however provoked the spectator to take a role in "activating" these imaginary and extremely "mean" machines, thus, completing them by their mere projections.

The Good Machines all generate from one drawing, where I depicted a complex "Machine of Good Luck". The "motion" of the machine itself is based on a saying in Serbo-Croatian language: "His (someone's) axe fell (was drawn) into honey", which means someone got really lucky. The main structure was made of four (lucky number) glass canisters, filled up with honey, with axe heads plunged into them. Those axes were then wired together to a complex system of gold wires that created a sort of antenna, wrapped around a crystal stick, altogether with white fox fur that should provide a basic static electricity for initial pulse.

Then the two pole wires were taken out and connected to a conductive copper helmet that receiver body should wear on its head. The receiver should actually be charged with luck.

The Family of these new objects was imagined on the basis of the gathering, storing, and accumulating of Good Energy. This Good Energy can also refer to good and welcoming thoughts. Or good emotions, ephemeral fluctuations. All of the objects wear some kind of antennas, armed with spiral coils to bring down those invisible forces to the cell and capture them. Copper conducts and holds these energies within the complex wire structures of the objects.

These objects are transportable and individual. Like in the past , when icons and sacred images were carried for protection and defense, these objects should serve the same purpose. They should refill us when we need it. They should provide us luck when we want. Give us comfort and love, just when we touch it. Make us believe in Good, only by the sight of them.

Only strong ideas that make their way to reality can triumph over the chaotic and shattered, dismembered and desolated world we might know.

Mihael Milunovic