With the Use of This Machine / New York

“Bring Distant Points of Interest Within Close Range With Use of This Machine,” reads the notice on the viewing platform telescope at the Empire State Building.

“Sometimes Our Point of View Won’t Always Win Out,” scrolls across the Fox News ticker tape.

“Imagine your job description said... Save the World,” declares the military recruitment poster.

Severed from their intended environments, these stray messages echo with an accidental, fortune-cookie insight. Kaleidoscopic in potential meaning, they become a roulette of associations. As David Graeber wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” 

Tomorrow’s meaning critically depends on today’s reading.

It was the week of the November 2024 election. The absence of a coherent, mutually agreed-upon reality had never felt so tangible, or so consequential.

On election night, I watched the final count from an empty Midtown Manhattan sports bar. The staff polished glasses, resigned to their team losing. While commentators analysed, the stakes abstracted. Democracy felt gamified and the medium lost it message.

‘With the Use of This Machine’ explores this time of multiple, contradictory understandings
of reality.  

From Tarot readings to stock market predictions, all of our rituals seek one thing - to calm our nervous systems before the unknowable future. In lacking certainty, we retreat to inherited beliefs, gather fragments of bad science, and cling to conspiratorial comforts.

Connections - chemical, neural and emotional - release dopamine, reward memory, and affirm assumptions. Simple answers are preferable to complexity. Contradictions muddy convenient narratives. Through confirmation bias, our longing for order creates its own illusion of it.

We become complicit in the fictions we fabricate; their futility feels safer than the chaos of uncertainty.

Myths bring comfort when all else is obscured. Through them, we exercise and expose the elasticity of our perception. We ossolate between belief and skepticism, superstition and science.

In comparing these moments, the project questions our collective memory, our contradictory perspectives, and the plasticity of interpretation.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the wizard is eventually unmasked — a false prophet revealed in all his frailty. As he drifts away in his hot-air balloon, he admits
“I can’t come back. I don’t know how it works.”

When Dorothy wakes from her parallel world fever-dream, the tornado passed and her family gathered, she exclaims, “There is no place like home.”

Having surrendered to our dopamine-fuelled fears, will
we still know how to find our
way home?