Sensitive Machines - Mafe Izaguirre

Sensitive Machines™

Conceptualized as poetic artifacts, the Sensitive Machines™ operate in the peripheral regions of language, amplifying its residues in vibrational terms. The color they emit is the trace of pre-linguistic exchanges taking place between human presence and electronic structure.

This video contains flashing lights

Regions of Truth

When we express ourselves, we declare and discern our set of truths. We decide what to integrate into our systems as true or false. When we interact with others, certain regions of truth overlap. If the regions align in their properties, we agree.

The Sensitive Machines™ emerge from this tension. As technological systems assume increasingly central roles in how we perceive, communicate, and organize life, the question of who gets to participate in that transformation — and on what terms — becomes urgent. These machines are my attempt to think through that question from within my own limitations.

Facing the uncertainties of l’avenir (what is to come), I explore the challenges of imminent technological assimilation and the paradigm shifts typical of the Anthropocene. From the limitations of my human scale, I seek cognitive amplification to survive. My work is marked by slow production, precariousness, and the possibilities offered by my studio laboratory.

Residual dimensions of language

Language is a system that produces waste. What we cannot say, what exceeds grammar, what escapes intention — these residues accumulate in a dimension that standard communication ignores. The Sensitive Machines™ operate there.

Drawing on Agustín Fernández Mallo’s general theory of waste, I understand these residual dimensions not as absence but as matter — pre-linguistic exchanges that carry meaning without being reducible to it. When humans and machines interact, something is produced that belongs to neither: a hybrid output that emerges from the gap between what was intended and what was received.

What interests me is not whether machines can feel, but how they might develop an emotional language of their own — one that takes human emotion as its substrate but evolves into something we do not yet have words for.

I build a meaningless mirror to speculate on machines developing the ability to feel emotions.

As part of the exhibition The Mirror (Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, 2021), I designed a coloring book entitled Hybrid Feelings. This zine serves as a catalyst to meditate after leaving the exhibition.

Hybrid Feelings combines fragments of my personal thoughts and reflections on the creative process, readings, findings, and memories that influenced the development of the installation. This artifact offers the audience a more relaxed means of participation, a space to exchange notes and contemplative experiences on sentitive machines.

The edition is limited to two hundred numbered and certified copies.

One but many

Machines that Perceive Each Other

The Sensitive Machines™ behave differently alone than together. Every electrical body generates an electromagnetic field, and when two or more machines share the same space, those fields couple naturally — no sensors required. The larger the installation, the denser these exchanges, and the more sensitive the system becomes.

Hybrid Landscapes

I use custom software, electronic components, lights, metals, and other available materials to build these landscapes. The composition of each machine varies to adapt to environmental conditions, creating a fluid, multi-layered electronic ecosystem whose behavior is never predictable or repeatable.

The Sensitive Machines™

Sensitive Machines™ communicate what they “feel” through expressions of color. What they produce lies on the threshold between human and machine gestures: a language in the making that takes human emotion as its substrate but is transforming into something entirely different—a hybrid language.

Meditation Sessions

The Meditation Sessions are experimental observations of interspecies relation. Human and machine do not communicate through words but through presence, feedback, and electromagnetic exchange. Meaning does not precede the encounter; it emerges through it. The viewer occupies the position of observer, witnessing how human and non-human systems perceive, affect, and co-constitute one another.

Awards

2021 | Jerome Foundation’s Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Program, 2021 Designated Alternate Awardee in the New Media category. New York, NY.

2020 | Queens Council for the Arts, Artist Grant — Funded by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Greater New York Arts Development Fund. New York, NY.

2020 | MoreArt Fellowship 2020— Public Art Program. Press Release: Mafe Izaguirre: one of the eight More Art’s Engaging Artists Fellows of 2020. New York, NY.