An Adaptation of a Friend's Dream

...His features were always shadowed, even in a lighted room. She would frighten him. She had a need for self-destruction that he didn't understand. She was often drunk in abandon--thirsty for that feeling of plummet. Like a thick cord winding, taut, down her wing, he had seen it glow as she fell. Tattooed on the twisted meridian of her arm's Qi flow a testament of promises. The chord would glow phosphlorescence under ultraviolet light, illuminating an immeasurable scripture of Self--a dense river of words flowing down with a restrained turbelence. Each infinitesimal glyph formed a tiny knot, a unique pattern of twisted current. The knots of the thin filaments of her qi were each wrapped in dense Gordian complexity yet exhibited such staggering symmetry that the text formed a rhythmic string of pearls, each a tiny gazing ball difficult to focus his eyes upon. The flow of patterns etched, spiraling down her arm, was written in a primordial language--a strand of ethereal peptines cataloging her every thought, a genetic strand of her existential predestination. At the shores of this luminous coil, her body would wash itself like a throng of bathers in the Ganges. In its raging white intensity, it wound into the center of her heart, her Mt. Kailasa, her soul's summit, the abode of Lord Shiva. The flow of Qi emanated from Her radiance, each thick coil of luminosity just a strand of Her voluminous hair. He himself had wished, in those brief glimpses, that he could bathe also at the shores of her Ganges--it's glowing waters first brisk and invigorating as it tumbled from the high altitudes of her heart, and then, as it wound into the balmy jungles of her body, a warm slow pulsation. He would dream that he was walking along that mountain river, giving thanks for the bounty of Her body through which it flowed. Wrapped in blue mist, walking north, closer to Her origin. So far north that the night could muster only a few hours of twilight before giving way again to the sun in its elevated equinox...

Automata Does Not Externalize Technology

Is necessity the fundamental driving force of invention?  Think back to
your earliest memory of designing something.  Regardless of the form it
took-- a sketch, a schematic arrangement of models, a stack of legos-- the
design itself is what carried value for you, rather than its
implementation.  More than likely, you stopped at the implementation
level, were satisfied by a design you were proud of.

I remember thinking about mechanical linkages (idealized machines made out
of rods and joints) as a very young child (although I had no idea that
they were called 'linkages' until I had nearly finished my university
degree).  I would often draw machines and schematic diagrams to figure out
admissible physical movement.

This was a natural form of exploration for me, in which I tested the
freedom and constraints of physical space.  This exploration was only
mildly abstract, possibly as concrete as dancing, sports or other forms of
spatial exploration.  It was a reflection of my interaction and
interpretation of my physical world; it was a reflection of how my arms
and legs moved, a response to watching spiders and trains.

It is not necessity that is the mother of invention.  Our propensity for
design exists of a level of naturality which transcends immediate needs.
We communicate by manipulating our world, by design.  This leads me to
propose a replicator.  This meme is a symbol of design without necessity
whose only purpose is as a reflection of ourselves and our world-- a
technological self-portrait.  The meme is: Automata.

We should start with some examples:

Jacques de Vaucanson's Canard Digerateur ("The Shitting Duck")
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n4.riskin.html

The Clockwork Automata of Jaquet-Droz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nxETblSi4

The former article comes from Jessica Riskin's book on the origins of
artificial life, of which I am sure there is a great deal to say, but I
will pass over this in silence.

My interest is our propensity for design as a method of understanding and
communicating our world.  Clockwork automata are wonderful examples of
design which resolve no great necessity but instead are intended to
display (perhaps narcissistically) the mysteriousness of our own
complexity.  We build robots which resemble spiders, beetles, dogs, and
humans not only in physical reality but more so in our ideas and in our
literature.

Automata (whether clockwork or robots) provide a gazing pool, a clue to
the conundrum of our own nebulous existences.  It is essential in my
definition that automata are not built to serve any purpose; they are not
robot maids or mechanical laborers.  They are thought experiments just as
much as they are physical things (if not more so).

In positing automata, I am also positing the naturality of technology.
Often enough, modern technology is regarded as an anomaly or pathology, an
abomination of misapplied power.  But the meme of "Automata" is one which
regards technology as a fundamental human trait.  This distinction is
important; when people point to the evils of technology, they point to
"that," an external thing.  Automata does not externalize technology, it
regards it as a reflection/manifestation of a natural and tangible
property of human-ness.

Our reactions to our world conjure laughter, dance, weeping and myriad
other behaviors.  Design is one of those same behaviors, natural and
inevitable.  Clockwork automata provides a symbol for this internalization
of technology, where philosophical explorations eclipse necessities.