MachineHistories

We are a two man outfit functioning shoulder to shoulder and our work exists as the by-product of the ongoing dialogue between the two of us. This discussion serves as a medium of building, as well as providing a space of concession, dissidence, and justification where we attempt to construct a shared vision. The conversations vary from piece to piece, but our belief in the potential of ordinary things (such as cabinets, hair picks, and beds) to confound categorization and posit variable subject matter remains a constant. Our collective experience has led us into investigating the development of industrial means for producing non-standard objects.\ \ Our work simultaneously straddles several disciplines, making it difficult for us to properly fit into a particular category. It is for this reason we created MachineHistories. We privilege no particular creative practice, which allows us to explore the interests of our choosing without discrimination. The thread that links everything together is our belief in process and production, regardless of the medium or venue. Our comprehension and investigation of process is what drives our production. We appropriate and re-appropriate systematic operations to transform the means in the pursuit of novelty, ingenuity, and response. This methodology is applied to a collection of machines, software and building techniques. Embedding the look of anomaly or error (such as extraneous tool marks and forced programming glitches) on the finished object announces the signature of production becoming the agent of decoration and thus the history of said machine. These embellishments communicate a new story to the observer about the design process, where the machine has the ability to yield a type of sentimentality.\ \ We believe this is when ordinary things become more than what they are. The methods of making go beyond the made, and the way things look are able to surpass themselves.

MachineHistories is owned and operated by Steven Joyner and Jason Pilarski. Wen Han and Ryan Oenning also play an integral part in the studio.