Photos from Jessica Nguyen @fenchurch

Máquina Fantasma 
Written by Weston Teruya
Miguel Novelo’s  Máquina Fantasma situates contemporary computing and new media equipment in the longer arc of tools and technologies that human societies have used to perceive and intervene in the world around us. By taking this long view, grounded in an indigenous perspective, he demystifies the spectre of innovation, the chase of profits, and planned obsolescence and its requisite wake of discards. 
By layering disparate technologies in the installation, like a digital screen and an automobile tire, Novelo animistically opens portals into the inner lives of our tools–giving a sense of their possible past histories and purpose. The screen displays the wheel–an ancient technology–as it rolls away and moves about. In other sculptures, Novelo cracks open computer casings and motor blocks, laying bare the inner mechanisms of tools typically hidden beneath polished surfaces. Computer case panels are utilized to build a larger structure of surfaces on surfaces; only obscuring other covers. Fans and heat sinks are displayed, recognizing their value to the smooth operation of our tools and emphasizing the resource costs of their workings. 
In other pieces, Novelo utilizes disposed digital cameras to capture new images. While most have been tossed aside because of glitches and imperfections in their sensors–what might be labeled as breakage and failure–he sees this as a useful tool to make images differently. The resultant ghostly smears of color make unseen things visible; perceiving things that are outside our current realms of knowing. The display screens in the installation also feature pixelization and cracks, elements that constantly remind us of the process of looking and the workings of the tool, not just an open window to peer through.
Novelo insists that new tools not be seen as separate from nature; something that can be disposable or elevated. Instead, his exhibition asks us to consider the materiality of disposed tech as it lives on the earth with us; the resource costs in how we operate these systems; and how we apply tools to community wellbeing and ways of knowing.  

https://www.recology.com/recology_news/recology-artist-in-residence-exhibitions-work-by-miguel-novelo-trina-michelle-robinson-and-cca-undergraduate-haley-mae-caranto-as-well-as-a-special-retrospective-for-former-air-artist-jim-growden/
Photos from Jessica Nguyen @fenchurch

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