Félix Maille

Machines Emerging from Refuse, Drifting (M.E.R.D.s) are hybrid assemblages that lie at the intersection of makeshift construction and micro-engineering.
They are slightly absurd entities, wandering, constantly reactive to light.
Machines, yes, but they produce nothing, perform no tasks and achieve no goals.
They drift.
Their name condenses their marginal position:
-    Machine, in the ancient sense of mēkhanē: a trick, a detour, an inventive device;
-    Emergent, from the Latin emergere: to surface from a neglected background;
-    Reject, that which has been expelled from the productive field;
-    Drifting, from derivare: that which flees the intended course, quietly deviates.
Each M.E.R.D. tries to restore to the reject a capacity to act – not through power, but through oblique presence, through imperfect reactivity.
They are more presence than devices.
They are more than what they do.
Through their groping, their hesitation, their ever-postponed search for purpose, they become machines of affect.
In a world saturated with injunctions to produce, to perform, and to be efficient, these recalcitrant machines offer another form of relation.
They do not impose, they suggest.
They do not aim at anything, yet they touch.
They are shaky technologies, on a human scale.
A damaged technical language, yet insistent.
They embody what the straight line excludes: the blinks, the detours, the peripheral vibrations.