Machines in Between is a year-long collaboration between artists and philosophers, historians and DJ’s, musicians and poets, biologists, sound engineers, dancers, conservationists. Together, we linger over a simple insight into the increasing entanglement between humans and machines. What is to be done as this entanglement intensifies in strange and familiar ways?
Our interest in the present technological moment, however, is not one of mere scholarly abstraction. On the contrary, we acknowledge from the beginning that questions concerning technology are questions of living and dying that play out everyday—in the joys and sublime trials, in the triumphs and in the inequities that a head-long rush into a techno-future foster and perpetually incentivize.
Indeed, how does one respond to this revelation, the categorical slippage between humans and machines? What to make of this slippage in the everyday world of gigging in the digital economy? What happens when our machines become more god-like, and more invisible, than our imaginations of transcendence, omniscience, and ultimate order can handle?
Machines In Between features the wit and wisdom of a cast of talented collaborators. And we are grateful for our community partners here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: the Lancaster Conservancy, Music for Everyone, and Modern Art.
Machines in Between is generously funded through a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support from Franklin & Marshall’s Center for Sustained Engagement with Lancaster.
The Machines In Between podcast is an episodic sonic journey. Hosts John and Libby Modern will guide you through a scintillating sonic landscape—an accumulation of bent stories, surprising cultural analysis, historical reflection, lush soundscapes, and beats sampled from obscure religious records. And along the way John and Libby negotiate their own relationship and their own sense of reality as they confront the creeping influence of the world’s leading tech-wellness group, Infinity 88, and its mysterious CEO Kelvin Trinsel.
Each Machines in Between episode is a kaleidoscopic soundscape engineered for headphones as well as for maximum pleasure and stimulation. You will laugh. You will cry. You will gasp with joy and terror. You will experience a sonic disturbance in a world increasingly saturated with machines and their metaphors.
In conjunction with the audio drops, Machines In Between presents The Vinyl Church: an interactive installation in which you will become immersed in sound, vision, and vibration. Located at Modern Art in Lancaster, PA, the Vinyl Church features hundreds and hundreds of records chosen for their insistence upon another world, and a sound system to conjure in you a sweet sense of our mechanical surround.
