Mat Collishaw, The Machine Zone: the title comes from a book about design

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 9 min

Four machines: robotic birds on a reward schedule, a mechanical eagle, a zoetrope spinning at sixty revolutions a minute, and Old Masters rendered as failed downloads. The exhibition takes its title from a book about how slot machines are engineered, and that provenance is the key to the whole thing.

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The Machine Zone, Mat Collishaw’s solo exhibition at the Gary Tatintsian Gallery in Dubai, brought together four works about how attention is captured and held: The Machine Zone (2019), The Nerve Rack (2019), The Centrifugal Soul (2016) and Expiration Painting.

The available reading is the one every notice took: an artist warning us about social media, algorithms and the erosion of attention. That reading is correct, and it is only the opening of what the room offers, because it is a position most people already hold and this exhibition carries it a great deal further.

The more useful entry point is the title, which Collishaw did not invent. The machine zone is a term slot machine players use for the dissociative trance they enter during solitary, rapid, continuous play, and it was documented by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in a book published in 2012. The book is called Addiction by Design.

Not by accident. Not by weakness. By design. Everything worth saying about this exhibition follows from that phrase.

What Schüll’s book actually argues

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas is not a book about gamblers. It is a book about an industry that engineers a psychological state and sells access to it.

Schüll documents the specific mechanisms. Interface design that makes the machine intuitive and tactile enough to disappear. Speed of play, engineered so that the gap between action and outcome is short enough to prevent reflection. Reward schedules algorithmically tuned so the reinforcement is unpredictable, which is the pattern that produces the most persistent behaviour. And ergonomics, the seat, the screen height, the reach, designed so that a body can remain in position for many hours without the discomfort that would otherwise end the session.

Every one of those is a design discipline. Interaction design, systems design, industrial design, human factors. The machine zone is not something that happens to people near slot machines. It is a specification, and someone met it.

That is why this exhibition belongs on a design site rather than only on an art one. Collishaw’s subject is not human weakness. It is professional competence pointed at a bad brief.

A zoetrope and a slot machine are the same device

One work makes the argument physically, and it does it by building a machine from the other end of the same tradition.

The Centrifugal Soul, made with the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, is a large three-dimensional zoetrope. Models of birds and flowering plants are arranged around a platform that rotates at sixty revolutions per minute, lit by strobe flashes synchronised to the rotation, so that each model is illuminated at the same point in each cycle and the sequence of static objects resolves into a continuous display of courtship.

A zoetrope is a Victorian optical device and it works on a single engineering fact: above a certain rate, the eye stops resolving discrete images and reads them as motion. Everything else about the object, the slot width, the drum speed, the number of frames, is calibration against that threshold. It does not persuade you that the birds are moving. It makes it impossible for you to see anything else.

Now put that next to the slot machine. A slot machine works on a different fixed property of the nervous system, the response to unpredictable reinforcement, and it is calibrated against that threshold with the same precision: spin duration, near-miss frequency, payout interval.

Both are devices that deliver discrete stimuli at a controlled rate in order to exploit something the nervous system does automatically. One produces a pleasure that ends when the drum stops. The other produces a state that ends when the money does. The difference is in the application, not in the engineering, and building the benign one at scale is a very effective way of demonstrating the point.

The Skinner reference in the title work makes the lineage explicit. The Machine Zone presents robotic birds performing repetitive programmed actions, referring to B. F. Skinner‘s conditioning experiments of the 1950s, where the variable reward schedule was formalised as a mechanism. Skinner used pigeons. Collishaw uses birds. The chamber Skinner built to isolate that mechanism is the direct ancestor of both the slot machine’s payout logic and the refresh gesture on a phone, and the exhibition puts the birds back in it.

The Nerve Rack is one design argument facing another

The Nerve Rack was originally made for Ushaw, a former Catholic seminary in County Durham. A life-size mechanical eagle stands in the chapel, wings opening, a mouse struggling in its talons, facing a nineteenth century bronze eagle lectern by Augustus Pugin.

Most accounts describe this as a confrontation between Catholic and Protestant England, which is what Collishaw has said and is plainly there. But the choice of Pugin specifically does something further that is worth drawing out.

Pugin is the central figure of the Gothic Revival, the architect who worked with Charles Barry on the Palace of Westminster and designed extensively at Ushaw itself. He also wrote Contrasts in 1836, which is one of the founding texts of design criticism in English. Its argument is that the design of buildings and objects carries moral content, that you can read the ethical condition of a society directly from what it builds, and that a debased architecture is the symptom of a debased culture.

So The Nerve Rack sets a machine built to demonstrate that attention is engineered opposite an object made by the man who argued that made things carry moral weight. Two design arguments, one hundred and eighty years apart, staring at each other across a chapel. Pugin thought a society’s values were legible in its ornament. Collishaw’s whole exhibition proposes that they are now legible in its reward schedules.

Whether that reading was intended is an open question, and the work supports it either way. The lectern is not a neutral prop, and putting a mechanical predator in front of it is a considerably richer decision than the religious reading alone suggests.

Expiration Painting borrows the language of a failed download

Expiration Painting presents reproductions of Old Masters in Plexiglas frames, deliberately left incomplete so that they look partially printed.

The visual reference is precise and contemporary. An image that renders halfway down and then stops is one of the most familiar sights of the last two decades: the interrupted download, the failed load, the progress bar that never completes. It is a specific graphic condition produced by a specific technical failure, and everyone recognises it instantly without ever having been taught to.

Applying it to a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio does two things at once. It makes a painting that took months into an image that failed in seconds. And it borrows the vocabulary of ephemeral messaging, where an image is designed to expire, and applies it to objects made explicitly to outlast their makers.

The word in the title is doing the work. Expiration is not decay and it is not damage. It is a scheduled end, set in advance by whoever built the system. Which returns the piece to the same argument as everything else in the room: the timing was somebody’s decision.

Collishaw builds his critique out of the thing he is criticising

The consistent method across all four works is that Collishaw does not depict machines. He builds them.

That matters more than it sounds. An artist can make a painting about algorithmic capture, and it will be a painting, and a viewer will look at it and agree with it and leave. A zoetrope spinning at sixty revolutions a minute does not ask for agreement. It produces the effect in your visual system whether you approve or not, and you cannot decline it by understanding how it works. That is exactly the property the exhibition is describing in slot machines and feeds, delivered rather than illustrated.

Collishaw, born in Nottingham in 1966, studied at Goldsmiths and was one of the sixteen artists in Damien Hirst’s Freeze in 1988, the show that launched the Young British Artists. His best known early work, Bullet Hole (1988), is a photograph from a pathology textbook enlarged across fifteen light boxes, which is itself a piece about the mechanics of looking: an image that compels attention through a delivery system rather than through subject matter.

Nearly four decades on, the method has not changed. Only the apparatus has, from light boxes to reward schedules.

What building the argument demands

Two points.

The first is that a critique built as a machine has to be a good machine, and the standard is exacting. A zoetrope has to hold its synchronisation precisely for the illusion to arrive at all. Work in this mode carries an engineering burden that a painting does not, and these pieces carry it: the rotation, the strobe and the models are locked together closely enough for the courtship display to resolve.

The second is richer. There is a productive relationship, in work of this kind, between demonstrating a mechanism and enjoying it. The zoetrope is genuinely beautiful, and the birds’ courtship display is genuinely pleasurable to watch, which is precisely the point. An audience can take the pleasure and find the argument waiting inside it, and a gallery full of people delighted by an attention-capture device is about as direct a proof of concept as the subject allows. Collishaw is experienced enough to have planned for that, and the reading in which the delight is the work is the one the room supports.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

One version of this exhibition is that technology is doing something to our attention. Everyone knows that, and this show goes considerably further.

The version that earns the room is narrower and harder. Someone specified the reward interval. Someone tuned the near-miss frequency. Someone designed the seat so a player could stay in it for eleven hours. Schüll’s title says it in three words, and Collishaw borrowed it: addiction by design.

An artist who responds to that by building machines rather than painting pictures of them has understood the assignment. A zoetrope will make you see motion whether or not you consent, and it will keep doing it after you know exactly how. That is the whole argument, delivered by the same means as the thing it is about.