‘Desiring Machines’ Dares Us to Imagine a Healthy Relationship with Technology

Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet. The column will appear every other Monday.

A classic illustration of a world that has fallen to technology first appeared on Facebook in the 2010s and has been circulating online ever since. You likely know it: Rows of bent heads gazing at their phone screens; each face replaced by a ray of light sucked towards the screen. By 2026, the illustration has become boomer meme par excellence, but it captures the familiar feeling that our relationship with technology is one-sided, hypnotic, and vampiric. AI-induced existential panic has only heightened this feeling, leading to a keen desire to set some boundaries with our devices.

Cue the Instagram infographics on how to develop analog hobbies; viral videos of young people simply socializing without their phones, digital detox camps, and the under 13 social media bans. Cue the paranoia that every so-called analog activity is inherently performative, such as reading in public.
But what if these measures were misguided? What if instead of punishing ourselves for our technological entanglements, we got curious?

That’s the question at the center of “Desiring Machines” a new exhibition on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mar del Plata, Argentina. At a time when it seems that the future can be clearly read in the inevitable march of technological advancement, curator Augustina Rinaldi leans on the work of philosophers’ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make an alternative claim: it is not innovation but desire which shapes social transformation, and thus, it is only by understanding our desires that we might generate new and unexpected futures.

The exhibition feature ten Argentine artists and is on view until November 2. Upon entering, one has the feeling of having entered into a laboratory. Organic and inorganic materials mingle in a controlled, sterile environment pregnant with possibility and invention. Device for Exhaling the Tremor (2025), a large sculpture by Celeste Martinez Abburra, explicitly recalls the stainless steel and glass beakers of a chemistry laboratory. Delicate glass vessels suspended by metal and connected by pipes gather condensation that drips into a pool of fetid water. In Joaquin Fargas’s Biosphere Project (2006-2026), aquatic plants floating in sealed globes are installed on a tripod of spidery, chrome pincers.

Two video works elsewhere reflect the uncanny, cold environment Rinaldi has curated in an attempt to capture, “an intermediate horizon” between the present and the future, as as per the wall text.

You Will Become Salt (2024) by Indira Montoya is set in the state of Córdoba hundreds of years after its inundation in a series of floods. Using photogammetry, a technique which renders 2D surfaces into 3D models, and game engines, Montoya directs a virtual drone that hovers over the ruins of cities and its strange, frozen residents. Celeste Martínez Aburrá’s film Cartography of the Infra-Thin (2025), also set in Córdoba, features a white field covered in snow where the artist has installed a series of smoke machines. The camera flies through this bizarre set of ice and vapor.

Facing this is Miguel Harte’s “Danza” series (2025), consisting of a ghostly forest of tree stumps bursting with oily, metallic forms; or alien vines invading their crevices. It’s an uncomfortable image: what is whole and organic has been penetrated by the technological tentacle, mirroring our own hopelessly enmeshed relationship with our devices and the infrastructures of power which produce them.

The work of Deleuze and Guattari provides a useful context to understand these penetrative sculptures that sit on a discomfiting spectrum of organism and machine. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from their 1972 book “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” in which they mount an attack on both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that desire stems from absence, and his related “Oedipus complex” which proposes that the unconscious is structured by an incestuous romantic rivalry—or as Deleuze and Guattari put it, the “daddy-mommy-me” trinity. Their understanding of desire is that it is not produced by lack but through any form of relation, including one’s relation to objects. The authors propose a more systemic understanding of desire as one cog in an organic machine, infinitely reacting to other machines.

Consider Martina Servio Olavide’s sculptural installation Untitled (2025). The work consists of a transparent female figure, sculpted with her back arched in a bridge position and filled halfway with water. She has no arms, and is surrounded by small, round mirrors. Her mannequin head is serene, but a set of external ribs peek out from underneath like the bony grip of a witch. The living element in the objectified shell, the splayed offering before a set of mirrors which both reflect her and the audience.

One reading of Untitled is as a diagram of how desire shapes our perception of one another and of ourselves. Even more, how that gaze is projected online.

The work doesn’t condemn social media, but rather withholds the predictable interpretation (it’s all objectification!), forcing viewers in for a closer look. Whether it’s the “Danza” series or the Biospheres Project, the works on view push us to consider that a flat rejection of technology is an overly simplistic reaction. If we confront the desire perpetuating these terrifying enmeshments, we might become capable of imagining a more creative future for these relationships.

In other words, desire, in an unrepressed form, explodes the channels through which it is expected to flow. Here, art works to excite a deeper perception of where our desire is being frustrated or forcibly channeled, and where it might flow if the dam broke. What might emerge if that desire was unleashed? “Desiring Machines” is not a diorama of the future. It is a snapshot of a process perpetually in motion. Our dance with objects, and through those objects, how we dance with each other.