Early Machines

Early Machines The early machines mark the beginning of an exploration of mechanics, body fragments, and movement. Playful curiosity meets inventiveness and an underlying sense of gloom.

The Small White Machine (1972) was created for a shadow theater. Gears, belts, and rods produced moving shadow images—the machine functioned simultaneously as an object and as an immaterial projection medium. This opened up a dual space: the concrete sculpture and its poetic doubling in light.

In later works, body fragments are added—legs, prostheses, artificial limbs. Clamped, fixed, or set in motion, they allude to vulnerability and fragmentation, but also to the desire to unite organic and mechanical energies.

Raw, improvised, and experimental, these early machines open a field between sculpture, technology, and existential metaphor. Today, it appears not only as a technical experiment, but as the starting point of a long quest—from shadow projections to the machine as a conceptual construct.

Since the 1980s, the machine has increasingly acquired metaphorical significance, in dialogue with Hans-Dieter Bahr (On Dealing with Machines, 1983; Machinations, 1986). In 1986, a shift in focus between art and philosophy occurred in our collaborative book Machinations, which re-examined the relationship between technology, imagination, and artistic practice.

Take this Link and the Film KLEINE WEISSE MASCHINE, 1972