MDDM23: The Man Voltaire Call'd a Prometheus

[Dave Monroe]

   "Too true, alas.  A Mechanician of blinding and
world-rattling Genius, Gentlemen, yet posterity will
know him because of the Duck alone,-- they are already
coupl'd as inextricably as...Mason and Dixon?  Haw-
hawhawnnh.  The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,--"
(M&D, Ch. 37, p. 272)

And from Barbara Maria Safford and Frances Terpak,
Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images
on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2001), "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," pp.
1-142 ...

   "By 1740, Vaucanson was busy automating the French
textile industry with punched cards--a technology
that, as refined by Joseph-Marie Jacquard more than a
half-centur later, would revolutionize weaving and, in
the twentieth century, would be used to input data
into computers and store information in binary form."
(p. 44)

And, what the heck ...

   "For her installation A Permutational Unfolding at
the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the American srtist
Eve Andree Laramee created sumptuos cerulean jacquard
drapery shot through with threads of dyed copper,
silver, and gold, evoking the shimmering ancien regime
salons in which the virtuoso automaton held sway. 
Strewn with cross-referencing associationbs, this
encyclopedic curtain that interconnects the past and
present is simultaneously a collection-in-cloth and a
woven gellery of mechnaical ingenuity.  It ties the
sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Pare's
design for a prosthetic hand to a sectional view of
Vaucanson's Duck.  The surgically efficient guillotine
of the French Revolution is counterpointed to the
copper-mesh cores of MIT's first computer capable of
memory storage.  The portrait of Ada, countess of
Lovelace--daughter of the poet Lord Byron,
mathematician, and colleague of Charles Babbage, for
whose analytical engine she wrote the first computer
program--is juxtaposed with the image of Jacquard, the
developer of the protocomputational automatic form. 
'The Analytical Engine,' noted the countess, 'waeves
algebraic patters just as the Jacquard-loom weaves
flowers and leaves.'  From Laramee's condensing
tapestry emerges a theory of analogically linked
communication.  Wever ants, crawling across the
bvackground terrain, embody and externalize the
materiality of these historical networks.  Humbly
'sewing' their small nests out of leaves glued
together with salivary silk, these creatures remind us
of the physical connection between miniturization and
mimicry, the juncture between the organic an dthe
inorganic.  They bear witness to the animal in
technology." (pp. 44-5)

Cf. ...

Stafford, Barbara Maria.  "Micromegalia:
   From Monumental Machines to Nanodevices."
   Eve Andree Laramee: A Permutational Unfolding.
   Exh. cat.  Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts
   Center, 1999.  37-44.

And see ...

http://web.mit.edu/lvac/www/SPRING1999/laramee.html

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