Androids in the Enlightenment

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/22/roentgen_jaquet_droz_the_robots_of_the_enlightenment.html

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 10:02 PM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> Androids in the Enlightenment
> MECHANICS, ARTISANS, AND CULTURES OF THE SELF
> ADELHEID VOSKUHL
>
>
> The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable
> mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built
> between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other
> artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands.
> Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing,
> or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted
> continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the
> present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era
> during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized.
>
> In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two
> such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not
> only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic
> a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were
> expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then
> communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl
> argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation,
> that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the
> sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of
> anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology.
> She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory
> production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves
> and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.
>
> http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo15357383.html
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l