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I am currently looking for gallery representation in America, Australia and Western Europe. If you are a gallery or know one please send me a message .email contact
Are you interested in getting in contact with me for freelance work or additional information ? Want to give me your feedback on the website? I just love any kind of feedback so tell me what's on your mind! Please send me feedback !mailing list
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How do you see the machines in your life? I’m guessing that to you, they are simply tools to get where you are going and do what you are doing. You mightn’t even realize the varied and beautiful ways that we interact. Humans love machines … many of us love them more than most of the other human beings on the planet. This is not to say that you love your computer more than your mother, or your child, for example, but honestly – would you rather lose your car, or the neighbour eight doors down across the street? You may never learn the wisdom of the ages they had … experienced their absolute uniqueness … felt the touch of their hand that hummed with life and was a connection to the universe and a world of meaning, if they were to die tomorrow. I’m sure, though, that you would be much more distressed (especially if you had never met them), that your car had been stolen, never to be returned (or replaced by insurance!), than you would if this person was taken, never to be returned. Or replaced by insurance! We love machines, yet we fear them. Humans and machines interact in many ways – including in love, in giving each other life, and in the sacredly mundane.

Gilbert Ryle tells us that we are as far from machines as anything could possibly be – that we cannot be explained in technological terminology – that we are more complex than even we understand, and may never be able to understand ourselves properly – incidentally, never as well as we understand machines. He wrote a famous essay, denouncing Descartes’ theory of the human mind – which he explains as:

Every human being has both a body and a mind, which are quite separate
After death the mind may continue to exist and function – the mind may exist without the body, but the body doesn’t exist without the mind.
A person living through 2 ‘histories’, as it were – their mental history and their physical history

So, he uses the analogy of a ‘Ghost in a Machine’ to explain the functioning of human beings – the ghost being our minds, and the machine being our bodies. Our bodies are mechanical, since everything in them can be explained, pulled to bits, put back together again, even replaced with plastic and metal, to some degree (this we know now, although Ryle, writing in the nineteen-forties, may not have). Ryle tells us that Descartes, along with the majority of society, makes a fundamental error in his and our perception of the human mind. He argues that we categorize our mind totally incorrectly, as being another thing like our body - only a completely opposite thing! Ryle finds it insufferable that Descartes acknowledges the existence of mind, then is not able to accept that it may be just another type of machine – albeit much more complex than a body - and can only describe it in terms of its oppositeness from the body. So our mind is ‘not in space’, ‘not physical’, etc.

Another error he attributes to Descartes is that the mind is categorised as a thing, governed by rigid non-mechanical processes (since it is the opposite of the body which is governed by mechanical processes) – therefore, the changes a mind undergoes a just a permutation of the application of some non-mechanical law, and not individual or random at all. In essence, he says that Descartes theory makes us into machines, by saying we are only not-machines.

the author

Domen Lombergar, young slovenian digital creator and artist, produces most of his artworks in only two dimensions. Putting aside some exceptions his computer screen represents his canvas and his tablet represents his brush. Yet not focusing on the used media Domen stays loyal to his expression ... the surrealistic motives often shock the viewer with their rawness and directness Uand emerge a wish to further explore the work and its message. Domen's refined sense for detail in combination with a high technical expertise lifts his creation on an even higher level. His style can most easily be defined as expressionistic, hyperrealistic or surrealistic. The quality of his art can also be described with numerous positive critiques on both slovenian and foreign websites and by various professional critics. His digital artworks have appeared in many prestigious Internet galleries.
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exhibition opening photos
Without putting the boxing gloves on and the mouth guard in, and jumping in the middle of the brawling Descartes and Ryle, some interesting observations can be made from both Descartes and Ryle’s arguments! Did Descartes really lump us in with machines when he told us we are ‘not-machines’? We may love machines … but things do not have to be alike to love each other. Just ask any old married couple, who sit across the dinner table bickering about how much salt the food needs, or the intricacies of cooking a carrot, but then go to bed snugly resting their head in the crook of the other’s shoulder, so comfortable they are not even aware of it … they would tell you (if they were well enough aware of the workings of their own minds, as Descartes assumes!), that likeness does not equal love. We can love machines without being them, totally. There may be just a little bit of machine in all of us…

Even technophobia, or fear of machines and technology, can be an expression of our machine-like predictability. Kathy Hogan Bruen, senior director of prevention for the National Mental Health Association, says a phobia is “a persistent, excessive and unreasonable fear brought on by the presence of or thoughts about the source of the fear. Exposure to the source can cause an immediate anxiety response, an urgent sense of needing to get out of the situation or a panic attack”. This sounds exactly like a human being, acting like a machine – playing out our pre-programmed response to a thought or idea. In this case, technophobes fear a loss of control, and a loss of control goes to the heart of our survival instinct. We don’t want to be at the mercy of others! Just like Ryle doesn’t like Descartes’ theory, that puts us at the mercy of these ‘rigid non-mechanical laws’, basically saying that free will, choice and individualism do not exist, we definitely don’t like to think that a machine may determine what happens in our lives. Technophobes express this fear of losing control by avoiding machines, only using them when necessary, and resisting learning to use all of their functions. Nobody has thought, yet, that we may be partly machines – that we may be just another form of those computers, touch-screens, or even cars, that we resist making more complicated and losing control over. We don’t our outmoded machines (our bodies) to be replaced by the ones we created … a justifiable fear, really, in the war between the meat-machines and the metal-machines!

Wendell Berry sums up our modern fears – “My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.” Perhaps, though, we could live even more fully by embracing the things that will replace us … loosening our death-grip on our own minds … living wherever we can, through machines or otherwise.

Opening Night Video Interview

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The Government Visits "Posthuman"

looking for
gallery representation
I am currently looking for gallery representation in America, Australia and Western Europe. If you are a gallery or know one please send me a message .email contact
Are you interested in getting in contact with me for freelance work or additional information ? Want to give me your feedback on the website? I just love any kind of feedback so tell me what's on your mind! Please send me feedback !mailing list
Get invitations to exhibitions and new projects by Domen Lombergar by signing up to the mailing list!