Classical Technology: Heron’s List

Technological devices listed by Heron of Alexandria in his book Pneumatics:

• A vase that makes a bird sound or a whistling sound when someone fills it with water.
• A vase that emits water in quantities proportional to the coins inserted – a kind of vending machine.
• Figures that dance when a fire is lit on an altar.
• Statues of animals that cry out and drink.
• A pus extractor (aka a syringe).
• An hydraulic organ.
• An apparatus that suspends light balls in the air on a jet of vapor.
• The eolipyle – possibly the first steam engine.
• A maintenance free oil lamp – as oil is burnt, the wick moves automatically.
• Compressed air chambers that shoot liquid (???).
• Pumps with suction and pressure that can shoot water in any direction because of a flexible head. Used to fight fires.
• A sucking device that does not rely on fire.
• A solar powered device for running water.

From Henri Boch’s Exposed: Ouija, Firewalking and Other Gibberish, p.118-9.

Photophones: A Promise from 1890

In 1890 the journal Review of Reviews, in its opening issue, promised its readers cross-continental ‘photophones’, which Roger Luckhurst in The Invention of Telepathy describes as “trains travelling at 300 miles per hour and telegraphing without wires – even telegraphic facsimile handwriting, tastes, and smells.” A little over a century later, photophones are part of our media landscape (although they are not trains) and can transmit handwriting (if you have a touchphone and stylus; or if you just photograph your handwriting and use MMS).

But maybe the past can guide us a little more into the future? For the noticeable omission in our slightly-differently-realised telegraphic/phonic media is the transmission of tastes and smells. Would seem a good project for Apple, no?

The Typewriter, The Gun and The Movie Camera (1996)

As paradigms of modernist technology, guns and typewriters share a cultural terrain. This landscape is shaped not least by the arms manufacturer Remington & Co. switching to typewriter production after the end of the American Civil War, but also by phenomenological issues in the machines’ use and construction; with typewriters we fire off words as firing off bullets from a gun.

The title of the above documentary on movie maker Samuel Fuller draws through these technologies and places them aside image making technologies. Sam Fuller was a writer and filmmaker, with a specialty in war films. That these tools of his trade should form a title for this documentary by Tim Robbins  (pt 1; pt 2; pt 3; pt 4; pt 5; pt 6) is almost commonsensical. However the title resonates in ways that lie under or rather away from the documentary; for all these technologies fire themselves in their relationality into the cultural landscape in the late nineteenth century.

Whilst the movie camera would seem to be exceptional, it is in fact fundamental, a phenomenological sibling to the gun and the typewriter; think of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography and his photographic gun (Fusil Photographique). We still shoot a photo, the rapid opening of the lens referred to as a firing, as fast and as hard as the ejection of a bullet, or the strike of type on platen.

Current Visual Obsession

These last few weeks have seen the graduate shows of art and design schools across the UK. At the RCA, Hector de Gregorio, a printmaker, produced a series called Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. De Gregorio states his aim is to seduce the viewer and with his densely rich images, specifically the one above called Lee Adams, Performer, he has completely seduced me. It is my current obsession and I am finding it difficult to look at anything else.

Bind me; or ways in which we dress our books

A collection of unusual bindings over at Abebooks. With prices.

Media: New: History

The introduction of new media … is never entirely revolutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such.

Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New. The MIT Press, 2006. p. 6.

The Rise of Classical Music: A Found Idea

Music betrays the very paucity of the words its sets, or, rather it makes emphatic the severe limitations of a reason that valorizes a rationality divorced from embodiment. Reason’s poverty is unmasked. (And it can be no accident that wordless music rises in importance in western history, apart from the special and important exception of dance, which by definition privileges the body’s relation to music over that of the mind itself, at the precise moment in early modernity that language itself is more and more systematically institutionalized as the bureaucratic tool of would-be corporate and state power, beginning with the slow rise of  the literate classes from the ranks of the monastic clergy, and ending in the modern boardroom).

Richard Leppert, ‘Social Order and the Domestic Consumption of Music’ in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, eds. A. Bermingham and J. Brewer. London: Routledge. p.529.

Eighteenth Century Manuals: A Selection

The eighteenth century saw a media explosion, an explosion of print and literacy rates. Resulting in the birth of the modern novel and the newspaper, other printed forms saw their popularity likewise increase; of these forms, my favorite is the manual. And of these manuals, such as The Pleasant Art of Money Catching (1737), a must-read has to be the intriguingly titled Every man his Own Vermin Killer (c. 1771).

Will add more to this list as I come across them ….

Pollock in the Eighteenth Century

Here is a description of techniques of image making in the eighteenth century, which seems to contain a description of someone working very like Jackson Pollock, as well as some early graffiti-artists:

I cannot help thinking, that the admirers of strong rough pictures are, in general, men of enlarged ideas, and frequently possessed of the wonderful talent of making portraits in the fire, or forming fanciful landscapes upon old broken walls, or any other place where there happens to be an assemblage of spots and blotches. – I am informed that a person of Birmingham acquired a considerable fortune by indulging a similar turn of mind. – He was so well convinced of the prevalence of this taste, that he established an academy for the purpose of promoting this style of colouring, and of producing pictures for the exercise of Fancy. These pictures were dispatched by placing five different colours at hand, dipping the ends of the fingers and thumb in these colours, transmitting them to the lid of a snuff-box, and then splashing the colours into confusion by striking them with the palm of his hand.”

Joseph Booth, A Treatise Explanatory of the Nature and Properties of Pollaplasiasmos, London:1784.

Speaking the Code Word, Properly

The eighteenth-century fetish of correctness in language was not restricted to diction and usage but extended to pronunciation … Needless to say, linguistic discrimination is a staple of human interaction – it was once quite deadly to mispronounce shibboleth.

Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Boston: Bedford Books, 1990. p.649.