The Mechatronic Library exists at a Lewis Turning Point — a cinematic phase transition where artists move from recording worlds to generating them


The Mechatronic Library is a curatorial platform enabling artists confronting the afterlives of colonialism to work with digital tools such as game engines, simulation, and real-time technologies for cultural production. Founded in 2010 by Afro-Indigenous curator Helen Starr, from Trinidad and Tobago, it operates at a structural turning point in the history of moving image: the transition from industrial cinema, which records the world, to computational systems that generate worlds.

The platform is guided by the philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s call for new modes of storytelling capable of moving beyond the extractive narrative structures inherited from colonial modernity. Game engines and simulation technologies offer artists a way not simply to represent the world differently, but to construct new ontological frameworks through world-building itself.

This shift echoes the work of Caribbean economist Sir Arthur Lewis, Nobel Laureate and colleague of Starr’s father, Dr Eric St Cyr, a plantation economist who participated in the landmark 1962 conference Problems of Unity in the West Indies alongside C.L.R. James and other architects of Caribbean economic thought. Lewis identified what he called the Turning Point: the moment when extractive systems reach their structural limit and must reorganise around new forms of productivity. Writing from the historical reality of plantation economies, he described the threshold at which surplus labour is exhausted and a new economic order emerges. Today, moving image culture is undergoing a comparable transition. Game engines allow artists to produce complex, cinematic environments without the industrial infrastructures of film, enabling smaller, more autonomous production ecologies.

The Mechatronic Library situates this transformation within a Carib cosmotechnic framework, grounded in the intellectual and cosmological traditions of the Caribbean, in which zero is understood not as absence but as generative seed: the point of transition from which new worlds emerge. In this sense, the Turning Point is not simply economic, but cosmological — the moment when extractive ontology gives way to generative world-building. Rather than marking an end, it marks a beginning.

Through exhibitions, commissions, and technical support, The Mechatronic Library enables artists to work directly within these emerging computational conditions, establishing new forms of moving image grounded in simulation, relation, and cosmological production.
The library functions both as archive and engine: preserving the histories of technological transformation while supporting the emergence of new cultural forms at the threshold of their becoming.

The Mechatronic Library is a social enterprise which is funded by sales of digitally produced artworks and experiences. All artworks are owned by the stakeholders - artists, not-for-profit museums and art galleries and The Mechatronic Library. Profits go back into producing more artworks and exhibitions.