my interpretation

Wow, I am pleased and grateful for everyones responses. They were really impressive. Thank you all.
Isnt this fun? I would be interested in your interpretations of my user pic now, or one of my other pieces displayed here and there in this blog. No one has done it w/my art yet. No question, no methodology, just tell me what you see in it and what it means to you. Please do.
This is partly taken directly from the session notes and partly the result of later mulling over and synthesis.
Day 1: sullied
The first things I said were ‘massive cover up job’ and ‘you expect me to buy this?’. The futility of applying black shoe polish to white shoes put me in mind of ‘painting the roses red’ in Alice in Wonderland. A doomed attempt to cover up someone’s mistake. I saw racial connotations in it too, extending to general identity masking.
The two people applying the shoe polish work feverishly, then toss their finished product out the door into the world (the world being art school, which is pretty damn funny). Their revamped readymade. Their ‘nu’ product. They have created nothing new, simply taken something already created, colored over it and called it theirs.
Day 2: do not remove until delivered to customer
In a very regulated order they are creating a new product, but a frivolous and unnecessary one that serves only the purpose of vain comfort. Whereas the day before they had operated by their own efforts, now they had introduced a machine. Also their movements were more machinelike, regulated and precise. Each pillow was superficially different, but created according to the same design, using the same movements each time. This suggests to me a stage at which product standard, technical prowess and knowhow has taken precedence over creative expression, while still allowing a narrow window for expression in the choice of fabric colors.
Perhaps purely because she told me that she had avoided the use of the word ‘consumer’ I had a persistent image of consumerism. She said that the difference to her was consumer seems a mindless state of gobbling up, whereas customer is more personal and suggests discernment. So much for that.
Day 3: the fantastic machines
Fantastic indeed! Reaching a new level of frivolity, we have now created machines just to make noise and keep people busy. They are each ‘plugged in’. They never vary the path they walk about the room, never leave their machine or trade machines. They are more involved and committed, yet less productive and creative than ever.
Btw, r tells me that only she beat her machine in the center. Her partner never came to the center, but hit his at each corner of the room. There’s stuff in that too but I’m not going there right now.
Day 4: die eier von satan
The eggs of satan. Despite derogatory comments about the merits of Tool as a band, this is one of their more amusing songs. For those who have not heard it, it is a repetitive, darkly threatening, heavily industrial background with a voice growling a tirade in German that grows increasingly excited to the point of frenzy, answered by the sound of a crowd cheering. It is obviously meant as a parody of a Hitler speech, and awfully scary unless you realize that it is a recipe for shortbread cookies, which our artists baked for the scene all day long with the song on repeat.
It seemed to me that the machine noise of the song itself emphasized the increased mechanization and regulation of the scene activities. We have a new evolution of the "noise making machine". It is now playing music, but music which sounds very machinelike. The same song repeated over and over. They have introduced other machines as well, the oven, mixers etc. The complexity of their product is also increased, but the product itself is still very frivolous. It is food, which is practical, but it is cookies, which are "junk food". Lots of work for little payback. Instant gratification. Empty calories. It is worth noting that as each box of cookies was tossed out into the "world" they were immediately taken by someone and consumed. The first truly "successful" product.
Day 5: pupate
Sorry there was a t in that word that I missed before.
This scene has the least actual human involvement, though it was originally intended to have the most. They had planned to fill their shapes with their own breath, which has huge symbolism. Breath of life, breath of inspiration, emptying oneself into the work. Except they couldn’t do it, and the machines had to finish the job for them. So they wound up with colorless plastic shapes filled with air by a machine, which still got to be called art. They walked away and left them there.
Golly. If that’s the future of art it looks pretty bleak.
Speaking as a converted photoshop devotee I no longer have any problem with technologizing (I think I just made that word up) art. Sure, let the machine do what is beyond your skill. Kickass. The art I have always wanted to make at the push of a button, yay! However, since I always type instead of handwrite, photoshop instead of paint, I am losing certain manual skills and I become concerned about it sometimes.
However I did not necessarily see the machines as being a literal representation of themselves, but as expressing pattern, structure, formula and ingrained habit. The dehumanizing effect is less in the presence of machinery itself, but in how adherence to pattern replaces spontaneous thought. We have developed all these wonderful systems to show us the right way to do things, to create predictable results, to have a common standard, and we write ourselves right out of the whole equation.
The encouraging thing is that eventually they gave up the exhausting pretense, left it in the boxlike room it had been birthed in, and walked out to go refresh themselves in the real world, letting everyone else puzzle over this useless thing that had been created.
The future of art is artists. Long live the revolution.