The image with which this lecture will open (illustration photo) is one of the drawings of paranoiac machines made by Robert Gie, who had been diagnosed with persecution mania and with hallucinations. It is selected here because it is referenced as a source for Deleuze & Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus as an electronic device produced by a ‘very talented designer’. In my work over the last decade I have been re-mobilising Deleuze’s concept of the technical object (and its prototyping) as objectile by assimilating the concept to a pataphysical clinamen. Gie’s machine is one of a number listed by Deleuze & Guattari from which my own work has proceeded. Their list is first produced by Michel Carrouges for his essay Bachelor Machines in which he recognises these machines as first being pataphysical, that is to say they are prototypical objects of the science of imaginary solutions.

The lecture will contextualise these bachelor machines in both architectural and cybernetic registers in order to present an argument for considering certain architectural works as works for works. The simplest of works for works or prototypes of the bachelor machines function in the way described by Ernst on collage – the coupling of two realities irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them. Such architectures can be called prototypes of a pataphysical system transferred into the material. Which is to say the lecture will be concerned with the non-hylomorphic technogenesis of the object (objectile) within the space-time of the imaginary solution.