Ever employed
this man?

Le Rêve des Machines is a mobile installation staging a public space: the street. It comprises several elements: a bicycle (Agent), a bus shelter (Dispatcher), and a series of twelve digital paintings (RH).

France is the European champion of fatal workplace accidents (2022). When I was a delivery cyclist, accidents around me were frequent and systematically raised the question of our status — self-employed workers doing a bullshit job as dangerous as it was poorly paid. Le rêve des machines (Agent) is a prototype of an armoured bicycle adapted to the delivery rider's working conditions. I drew on the improvised combat vehicles used in many wars, notably the SVBIEDs used in Syria. Here I draw a parallel between worker and martyr: both are offered a promise of emancipation conditioned on their merit, designed to legitimise total subjugation.

In place of a manager, delivery platforms use an automated algorithm to distribute orders to riders: the dispatcher. In his letter of the same name, Günther Anders raises the question of what machines regard as being. He supposes that for a machine, "only what betrays an aptitude to become a piece of apparatus will be catalogued and recognised". Consequently, the dispatcher could only regard riders as its extensions.