Stephen Douglass

A siege engine or device is a proactive response to a crisis. That crisis is the belief that communication works, that communication is possible, and that it defines reality as information permeated by mass media and our systems of signification.

The word and the image, as structures of those systems have the capacity to capture, determine and control how we behave. In the process our beliefs are shaped and the discourses of our society become embedded, and are presented and represented as facts. Those disciplinary practices are so embedded in the structure that they self perpetuate.

The system to confront and undermine that structure of communication is a siege engine. This device brings parts together through the method of inclusive disjunction, to transform a mediated reality that is deferential to representation. They are deployed as an ensemble of alternate ordnance tools to explode the foundations of communication that reinforce ongoing power relations within the social body.

These devices emerge as part of open-ended performative practices that refuse representation and the logic of mediation as our only way to access the material world. By having no inherent boundary, and in the affirmation of contingency, they seek to expose the inconsistency of reality, and breach the integrity of the structures that codify our reality. In that challenge there is no expectation or imposition of an outcome.