Minsoo Kang: Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · automation, machine, robots, technology, vitalism
From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.
Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today.
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2011
ISBN 0674049357, 9780674049352
368 pages
review (Sara Cole, Rhizomes)
Comment (0)Kempelen: Man in the Machine (2007) [English/Hungarian]
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · art, machine, media archeology, technology
The catalogue of an exhibition on Bratislava-born 18th-century author, polyhistor and inventor of the chess-player automaton and the speaking machine, Wolfgang von Kempelen, organised by the C3 Foundation and ZKM Karlsruhe, held in Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle, Budapest, on 24 March – 28 May 2007, and curated by József Mélyi and Rita Kálmán.
“The history of the chess-player automaton of Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 – 1804) and its legend have engaged artists, scientists and laymen for centuries. Now, more than two hundred years after von Kempelen ’s death, the joint exhibition of C3 Foundation and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, setting the two outstanding mechanical inventions of the polyhistor – the chess-player automaton and the speaking machine – at the centre, attempts to focus not only on the most enduring memories of his almost unfathomably far-reaching career. Alongside the portrayal of von Kempelen as scientist, engineer, artist, showman, civil servant and private individual, the exhibition broadens the picture onto the Court of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the mechanical inventions of the epoch, the invention of the era of invention, the Freemasonry movement, and the Turk- and puppet-mania of the century.
Even though we are separated from von Kempelen ’s world by more than two hundred years, we can still recognise the similarities between that atmosphere of scientific discoveries constantly outbidding each other, with technical and technological innovations appearing in the second half of the 18th century, and the multifariousness of art forms, and our own present.
The other aim of the exhibition is the elaboration of the history of innovative thinking, and the presentation of elements of technical and conceptual history inspired by von Kempelen and his mechanisms. Alongside the historical correlations, the show presents contemporary media artworks – in part, commissioned specifically for this occasion – that, taking the sphere of thought of von Kempelen ’s inventions as their point of departure, discover the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the questions of the present day. ” (source)
Edited by József Mélyi, Rita Kálmán, and Edina Nagy
Publisher C3 Foundation, and Műcsarnok, Budapest, 2007
ISBN 9789630620567
112 pages
Exhibition
Exhibition (2)
Publisher
Henning Schmidgen: Das Unbewußte Der Maschinen: Konzeptionen Des Psychischen Bei Guattari, Deleuze Und Lacan (1997) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · desiring machines, machine, philosophy, philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis, technology
25 Jahre nach Erscheinen des «Anti-Ödipus», jener furiosen Abrechnung mit Strukturalismus, Marxismus und Psychoanalyse à la française von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari, sind die dereinst gefeierten oder heftig befehdeten «Wunschmaschinen» erneut Thema. Frei von Exaltationen der damaligen Rezeption, fast aufreizend nüchtern rekonstruiert Henning Schmidgen den Maschinenbegriff der Autoren, wobei er den meist vernachlässigten Guattari in den Vordergrund rückt. Das ist solide, aber bleibt thematisch eng und dürfte wohl nur Experten interessieren. Anschlüsse zur zeitgenössischen Technikphilosophie werden angedeutet, nicht ausgeführt; das gleiche gilt für Bezüge zu Heidegger oder Parallelen zu Bloch. Von grösserem Interesse ist sicher, was der Autor über die Beziehungen zwischen Guattari und Lacan zu sagen hat. Den nicht so sehr am «Anti-Ödipus» Interessierten sei der Teil über Lacan ans Herz gelegt: ein sorgfältiger Nachvollzug des von Lacan im Kontext seines Seminars über E. A. Poes «Entwendeten Brief» unternommenen Versuchs, Freuds Wiederholungszwang als Wiederholungs automatismus zu rekonstruieren. Dass es Schmidgen gelingt, Lacans Analyse der Regularitäten von Wiederholungsvorgängen mittels Symbolgruppen verständlich zu erklären, ist dem Autor hoch anzurechnen.
Publisher Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Muenchen, 1997
ISBN 3770531957, 9783770531950
188 pages