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In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari distinguish tools from weapons extrinsically. Based on their projection, the same object could be one or the other. Tools encounter resistance to be conquered, looking for a state of equilibrium or a form of interiority. They have a different relation to movement and speed than weapons, yet increasing mechanisms of projection can make them behave like one. Weapons have a projective character and a propulsive essence. Deleuze and Guattari quote Paul Virilio’s concept about weapon-speed complementarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the weapon. “Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon.”^[1]

The axe is a wedge, an example of a simple machine that has been used as a cutting tool since the beginning of human times. If thrown against a target, it can be lethal, and the Franks used them to wage their battles and conquer territory during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. In the Franks’ hands, the axes adopted the speedy propulsive nature of a weapon, yet with other groups, the axe throwing was surrounded by superstition and, in the case of the Basques, a variant of rural sport perpetuated the tradition of horizontal or vertical log cutting. These axe masters are generically called aizkolaritza (aizkora meaning axe).

The Brazil-born, Bilbao-based artist works intuitively, and she aimed to implement the axe as a motive in the work, inspired by its metonymic and symbolic entails. The image of the axe was loaded with political meaning in the context and time Jauregui grew up in and this unilateral omnipresence might have been her drive to implement the image in her practice. Formally, on the other hand, her interest in the object and its sculptural possibilities brought her to collaborate with her father’s cousin, who turned out to be a metal artisan in Urnieta, who specialised in axes. For her project Aizkora, shown at Azkuna Zentroa in 2022, they created a series of metal sculptures made out of leftovers of previous works combined with axe heads manufactured at the workshop.

Prior to her production Jauregui revised more than 14.000 posters at the Fundación de Benedictinos de Lazkao archive and only found ETA anagrams and the Negu Gorriak logo.^[2] The homogeneity and repetition in the representation lacked any space for poetry and imagination and thus, in her project, she attempted to connect the axe with other meanings and connotations, rather unrelated to the usual associations settled in the collective mind.

Sahatsa Jauregi, *Aizkora*, 2022. Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

Interested in the technologies of seduction, surrealist art, and creators such as Paco Rabanne, J.G. Ballard, she experimented with cyborgian assemblages to contemplate the organic and the mechanic. The pieces comprised of helmets, masks, pairs of eyes and axe heads might operate in the sphere of the “barbarian” metal masterpieces of minor and pieces of jewellery art that Deleuze and Guattari mention, specifically the gold or silver plaques attached to small movable objects, which “pertain to the object in motion and thus constituting an expression of pure speed.”^[3] Jauregui’s objects are, however, static and her set of sculptures presented in Aizkora crystalise the notion of the body and the machine as the ultimate form of assemblage.

Furthermore, the objects also feel like what critic Clara López Menéndez refers to as “plain sculpture.” This category departs from personal symbolic and sentimental value, something fluctuating between unintentional self-portrait, commercial shop window, spiritual image, fetish and decorative figurine of dubious provenance. Jauregui herself narrates that her childhood elapsed in a nomadic setting. Her parents would travel and settle in various places and collect objects from each place, informing a fetishistic interest in her young mind. Perhaps that context was an early influence for her “plain” sculptures that Clara López Menéndez describes as “totem phantom coat rack, suspended image, surrealist interpretations of clothing advertisements on Instagram, algorithm’s combinatorics perverted by the aesthetic will of the artist who animates the ensembles by generating new echoes, suggestions of an intimate dialogue between objects.”^[4]

López Menéndez quotes Alfred Gell’s comments on the car, another body-machine assemblage loaded with cultural and political symbolism and reminiscent of the man-horse. Gell claims that car owners regard their vehicles as body parts, prostheses, something invested with his (or her) own social agency vis-a-vis other social agents^[5]. Gells’ description resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the man-horse, originally carrying a lance or a sword, since the Bronze Age, which was a constituent of the nature of a weapon system, a military agent, rather than a social one. The implementation of features in this combination, such as the stirrup, entailed a shapeshift of the weapon’s outlook, “new figures,” mainly longer versions of the old assemblages, which rendered the shorter ones, such as the battle-axe, obsolete.^[6]

III

Before Aizkora, there were other forms of human-machine assemblage in Jauregui’s work.

The recycled pieces that she combined with the axe heads in Aizkora were recycled from a previous production, Los Brutos, which happened at the former factory Artiatx at the Bilbao Ribera in 2021. The exhibition was comprised of bidimensional metallic sculptures made out of silhouetted cuts.

Two parallel ceiling-to-floor walls made out of flat metal sheet cuts, standing on poles, take over one room. On the second floor, multiple individual sculptures would stand free around the space. The positive and negative parts of the cuts are separated and assembled for the wall and for the free-standing sculptures respectively. Despite the bidimensionality these standing compositions are enough to reveal silhouetted full bodies, torsos and body parts: single legs in multiples, mirrored seated bodies, and so on. The depicted characters seem to have been in motion, following perhaps a sensual choreography that got captured, flattened and turned into static fragments.

The original images on which the metal cuts are based are not revealed but are abstracted and transferred into the metal plates in the form of a silhouette. The abstraction process is even repeated, since the images are made from a physical action, turned into digital images and then printed and turned into physical sculptures. The sculptures in Los Brutos have a photographic nature, and even a digital one. The flattening of the sculptural work may parallel the flattening effects of the digital realm and the internet. They deal less with the notion of the veneered banal object that López Menéndez and rather with the notion of the image and its flattening effect. A focus on the flatness rather than the “plainness” of the object.

Sahatsa Jauregi, *Los Brutos*, 2021. Espacio Artiatx, Bilbao.

This is a translation from representations into concepts and vice-versa, what Villem Flusser would call grasping. For him, the transition from the pictorial surfaces into one-dimensional lines is a reduction with “a conceptual universe of texts, calculations, narratives, and explanations, projections of an activity that is not magical”^[7] as a result. Yet what is magical for him is the turning back to two-dimensionality, into the imaginary and mythical. For instance, aspects of the emerging life structures such as the magic that flows from technical images or the magic-ritual behaviour of those knowledgeable about technical images.^[8]

A direct contact with a hand is required to propel axes and swords, whereas to propel a missile, the hand will send an order by pressing a button, but never get in direct touch with the missile. The computer enables a distant action, an abstraction of its material entails. Computers are now ubiquitous tools for work and leisure. They are able to abstract reality, turning it into binary lines and then images, providing a major part of what we get and understand from the world today. Villem Flusser claimed that technical images are possible through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules.^[9] However, this lack of faith in rules might have been lost from the user’s perspective. From the programmers’ end, this faith, however, is a condition in order to accelerate the process of making these machines compute, which originated in the context of World War II following instructions from the US defence departments.

During wartime, computing projects were in high demand, and countless resources were invested in their development. IBM built MARK I, an arithmetic device developed by Harvard Professor Howard H. Aiken, which could “solve any problem.” Many hands were needed to manage the assemblage of 765,000 electromechanical elements, and hundreds of miles of wire resulted in boards full of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The MARK I was one was still a very primitive design by today’s standards, but it was programmable, though without a clear distinction between hardware and software. IBM took the rights in exchange and donated them to the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken, which decoded messages from enemies and calculated ballistic problems. Lieutenant Grace Hopper was sent to Harvard in 1944. A mathematics PhD and former Vassar teacher who joined the US Navy, Hopper was assigned to write a program in a week, lacking any manual or previous instruction and without an engineering background. She wrote the first programs and the code that solved some of the war’s thorniest mathematical problems till that day.^[10]

The sculpture AZPITIK DOAZ (UNDERNEATH) (2024) was made and shown at Tabakalera in the frame of the exhibition Larruak eta izurrak, curated by Laura Vallez Vilchez. A massive scaffolded, one-lined structure that stands free recalls the ridiculous scale and rectangular shape of the first giant modular computers. Jauregui describes it, as an interconnected system from which images of tools, lead, prosthetic entities, weapons, and wars arise. It resonates with the characteristics of MARK I, which initiated the possibility of military action from a distance. The structure also acted as a proxy, or a figure in a dramaturgy, for direct action. The theatre group TRIPAK performed on the structure, providing a live-action that contrasted with the static nature of AZPITIK DOAZ (UNDERNEATH) all the other days that the exhibition was on.

*Larruak eta Izurrak*. Tabakalera, Donostia-San-Sebastián. 2024

Jauregui’s most immediate thought when she thinks of a body replaced by the machine is David Will’s notions of the prosthesis. A common use case that triggers the dramatic implementation of physical prostheses is the war. The war generates voids of all kinds that sometimes prostheses can fill. Military technology is instrumental in the creation of voids, whether physical or geographical. The same technology is instrumental in designing replacements for these voids. David Will observes that a consciousness of the self and a feeling of identity is enhanced by

the feeling of these physical and emotional voids, concluding that the modern body is based on the idea of a prosthesis. Jauregui’s approach praises the potential of dysfunctionality to project sensuality and awake desire, echoing Crash and Titane in the background of her work, as well as the “objet à fonctionnement symbolique” from the surrealists. The fear of being replaced by machines and machine intelligence is ironic, since the first cybernetic machines had gaps that needed to be covered by humans physically and intellectually. The hands that switched the transistors were crucial to the machine’s functionality, and so were the human calculators, all female, who wrote the initial programs manually before turning their calculations into coded instructions, or what we know today as software.

Ever since the 1940’s computers have downsized dramatically, microprocessors of the size of an insect have replaced thousands of switching devices. The relays and vacuum tubes these are made of have given way to silicon, tantalum, palladium, copper, boron, cobalt, tungsten and more,^[11] which have exponentially stretched the capacity of computers to process at light speed, much faster than an axe propelled by the Franks. These processing units have enabled unfathomable speed and major accuracy in the recognition of patterns for the development of artificial intelligence. AlexNet made Nvidia GPUs the industry standard for training neural networks,^[12] but the breakthrough happened when they combined the neural networks with massive image datasets created by ImageNet. Founder of ImageNet Fei-Fei Li advocated for the huge datasets, which was dismissed for years until AlexNet’s neural networks used her data sets for their training. The combination of hardware, computer vision and neural networks changed the paradigm of language model training.

The sensual and affective interactions with automated metallic entities, following Crash and Titane’s imaginary, have given way to virtual avatars and AI interactive companions. In contrast to other technological objects, the fetishisation of AI entities has turned immaterial, making us feel less lonely despite all the alienation. We fear sentient entities because they might steal our copyrighted material to create a poem. In his recent text Machines of Loving Grace^[13] Anthropic founder Dario Amodai attempts to calm down these fears and praise the benefits of AI to upgrade our lives. Meanwhile, his company Anthropic (the more ethical version of OpenAI) is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make their language models available to U.S. intelligence agencies for military purposes, following OpenAI, Palantir and Anduril’s examples.^[14] BigTech is becoming a war machine implicated in civilian deaths in Gaza, Lebanon and other places to come. The physical prosthetics in children are as ubiquitous these days as the virtual prosthetics that digital applications mean to our brains. Images of the effects of the wars circulate among beauty advice by influencers and exhibition opening announcements. Yet, the activist imagery protesting these dubious ethics is suppressed and its mediation is non-existent, coherent policies around the ethical use of AI ^[15]

Deleuze and Guattari urge us to look at whether the technological item is meant to destroy people or produce goods in order to determine its nature. AI researcher Michael Spencer has a similar point regarding ethics, which are not in the research but in the use that is made of tech^[16] The distinction is extrinsic and the secondary adaptations of a technical object don’t preclude a general convertibility between categories. In this light, Silicon Valley’s direct collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is another example of technological weapons, such as the first computer or the Franziska thrown during the early Middle Ages.

^[1] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.395

^[2] Desmuntatzeak eta ornamentuak / Desmontajes y ornamentos, self-published catalogue, 2023

^[3] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Op. cit., p.401

^[4] Clara López Menéndez, #BILDUMA, Notas alrededor de una “escultura llana”, Futuro y movimiento.

^[5] Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 18-19.

^[6] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Op. cit., p.399

^[7] Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p.9

^[8] Vilém Flusser, Op. cit., p.6

^[9] Vilém Flusser, Op. cit., p. 10

^[10] Claire L. Evans, Broad Band, Portfolio; American First edition (March 6, 2018), p. 41., p.41

^[11] https://www.designlife-cycle.com/nvidia-gpu#:~:text=%E2%80%9CGPUs%20are%20silicon%20layered%20with,engineering.com%2C%202021.)

^[12] https://www.understandingai.org/p/why-the-deep-learning-boom-caught?source=queue