Machine Love: The Making of… “Everything Old Is New Again”

Imagine this. You pass a laneway in the dark. At the end of the dim, cavernous lane a beautiful woman flirts shamelessly. The object of her affection is not a handsome suitor but – a vending machine. She gyrates, blows kisses, and dances with the monolith. It puts me in mind of a famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A still from the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).

At the dawn of time, as a dark rectangular monolith appears from nowhere, our primitive ancestors (a horde of belligerent monkeys) dart around the mysterious object trying vainly to make sense of its appearance. Then the descent into chaos begins. Eventually a malevolent, homicidal machine – HAL 9000 - overtakes a super-intelligent but gullible human whose mistake was to love the alien.

The rise of the machine and the obsolescence of the human has been predicted since the first mainframe computer was invented in 1939. Vending machines predate the first mainframe computer by almost 2000 years – Hero of Alexandria (circa 10-70 AD) devised a machine that dispensed holy water.

A vending machine is pretty simple – the most complicated ones include some basic robotics in the dispensing mechanism. Like Hero’s holy water machine, gravity does most of the work. Nowadays all they need is some electrical power for refrigeration, some product and a few coins and off they go. A bit like this artwork. It’s plug and play – connect it to a power source and away it goes.

When we asked a performing artist to act out the scene that was incubating in the fertile, perhaps even hyperactive, collective minds of Liu Dao, she needed only a few instructions.

Serena and Anto supervise the flirtatious scene.

The sequence was filmed entirely on our set in the  island6 headquarters at M50. Our set builders created the bulky form of a vending machine – actually two butted together – and then painted the set piece bright green.

A scene from the photoshoot for “Everything Old…” Art director Anto Lau in the background.

This gives the performer a form to negotiate during the filming, and when it comes to post-production, we can filter the set piece out and overlay what we always had in mind – a pair of vending machines painted in superb, minute detail by one of our classically-trained Chinese artists, the immensely talented Xu Yihan.

Machine love. A performing artist and the object of her affection – a green screen vending machine.

The work of Liu Dao is often about the rupture between tradition and modernity, or at least the tension between the past and the technological future.

Liu Dao, “Crucible of Dreams” (2014), RGB LED display, acrylic painting, paper collage, teakwood frame.

But this particular artwork, “Everything Old Is New Again” pokes fun at the sometimes fraught but symbiotic relationship between human and machine.

Here’s it’s sassy little blurb:

I’ve told the same story for the past ten years. I’ve perfected it now, and it’s funnier than the original incident. The best part about taking a new lover is not the thrill of getting to know one another, but getting to brush off dusty tales and tell them like new. I’m addicted to hearing the laughs and the sighs and to seeing eyes crinkle when I get to the punch line. It doesn’t stop at stories. Whenever I am tired of my wardrobe, I simply go shopping for a new boyfriend. I pluck imaginary price tags from this yellowing dress and head off to giggle on my thousandth first date. It really is a lot easier on your wallet. I can’t recommend it enough. My mama says this isn’t the best strategy for lifelong happiness, but who needs love when you have an endless stream of new? Just punch in the code and a stale quip will tumble out just in time for your lips to form old words with fresh charm.