In the process of trying to understand the relationship of art and technology, I have been making a series of collages. I am not really sure what makes them “about” art and technology, just as I don’t quite understand what I intuitively know to be the inextricable connection between the two. I usually start a collage with a vague idea or spark that interests me and usually not more than one or two key images. I add other images as they start to “talk” to each other. I discover the connections as I go along, and sometimes long after the collage is made.

This collage started out to be about the eighteenth and early nineteenth century fascination with automata–mechanical figures capable of performing compex tasks and exhibited “at all the royal courts of Europe.” Famous early automata were Henri Vaucanson’s Duck (1739) that could eat and excrete, and Pierre Jacquet-Droz’s Writer (1773), which could write any 40-character sequence of letters. A stack of cams–one for each letter–represents a sort of short term memory, programmable via a tabbed input device on the writer’s back. The output device is a quill pen. The writer is in essence the oldest computer, pre-dating Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine by half a century (the first differential calculator, programmed by a female mathematician, Countess Lovelace–a.k.a. Ada Byron, daughter of the poet).

The Duck and the Writer don’t appear in this collage, but Olympia, a fictional automatic doll inspired by them, does. Eerily lifelike automata feature prominently in the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). The tales concern the shadowy and indefinite boundary between the real and the magical, rationality and irrationality, science and spirit. Hoffmann’s tales influenced Pushkin, Gogol, Poe, Dostoievsky and Hans Christian Andersen as well as composers Robert Schumann, Jacques Offenbach and Tchaikovsky.

In Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffmann (the first opera I learned to love), the poet Hoffmann, when a young student of natural science, meets the beautiful “daughter” of his mentor, Spalanzani, and falls hopelessly in love. Hoffmann’s valet is not taken in for a moment. He even taunts the sinister eyeglass-maker Coppelius when ordered by the smitten Hoffmann to pull three ducats from his purse to buy the glasses Coppelius assures him will allow him to see Olympia with even more ravishing clarity. The glasses already on, Hoffmann however notices nothing except Olympia’s singing, dancing and eyelash-batting (they click), and Spalanzani is clearly delighted at the prospect of a sale in the guise of a match. However, it all ends in tears, a broken doll and a sadder and wiser Hoffmann. Some of E.T.A. Hoffman’s young protagonists don’t get off so lightly in their encounters with the quasi-scientific, always shadowy realm of the facsimile-human automaton.

The scientific fantasy of creating humanoid life naturally recalls Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). (Shelley saw the Jacquet-Droz automaton on exhibition soon before writing her novel). Today, we know the story more from the 1931 Universal Studios version. In the movie, Dr. Frankenstein carries out his feverish labors in an elaborate laboratory of a more modern kind than Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein (whose science was instead called “natural philosophy,” the term “science” not yet having come into general use) might ever have imagined. The movie monster-man is given life by means of an electric ray harvested from lightning and transmitted through sophisticated equipment–a scene Shelley, who is very delicate on the exact process of creation employed by her protagonist, never envisioned.

The dramatically kinetic movie ray is based on the Tesla coil (the collage image comes from an old postcard from the Los Angeles Observatory, where the Tesla coil exhibit fascinated me from childhood). The high voltage/low amperage coil was the invention of Nicola Tesla, who demonstrated it to the Royal Society of Engineers in 1891. Tesla currents were employed early in the 20th century for medical use. Devices for treatments, involving painlessly “heating” the body from the inside, received trade names like the “Violet Ray.” The movie Dr. Frankenstein says “I have learned many things about the Violet Ray. Here in this machine I have gone beyond that–I have discovered the great ray that brought life into the world!” This is not so far from fairly recent scientific conceptions of cosmic radiation or electrical events that could have sparked life on Earth in a so-called organic “soup.”

Tesla today is a legend, well represented in dozens of websites as an almost mythic populist savior, who envisioned his alternating current technology placed at the free disposal of the public. He was of course thwarted by government and corporate interests who discovered they could regulate and thereby profit from electricity. At the outbreak of World War I, Tesla proposed to the military a “death ray” capable of focusing a thin, concentrated beam that would not scatter, even over huge distances. He promoted the device as a purely defensive weapon, intended to knock down incoming attacks. He was ahead of his time–by about sixty years. Neither Ronald Reagan nor as yet, Bush, quite pulled off the Strategic Defense Initiative (otherwise known as “Star Wars”): a ring of “death rays” circling the planet. Only to be deployed for defensive purposes, of course.

In a lower corner of this art/technology collage there is, naturally, a gnome–my tutelary technological spirit. Gnomes and fairytale dwarves know the secrets of the earth, of elements and metallurgy, and the ring of their forge-hammers is the legendary origin of the poet’s meter. The gnome is a reminder of the very deep mysteries connecting art and technology.

“Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven:

We know her woof, her texture: she is given

in the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Emply the haunted air and gnomed mine–

Unweave a rainbow…”

–Keats, Lamia (1819) 

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