UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Archiving, Techno-topia and Pervasive Scepsis
The fascination with conceptualising and designing machinic people—androids—seems to have
peaked in the 18th century and carried with it a philosophical difficulty, the antithesis of mortal
lives: ―Man is subject to time, to its inevitable march towards death, whereas the clockwork
automaton merely marks time without falling prey to it.‖ 22 For this reason, the fascination with
mechanical life was rather paradoxical, just as fascination with ‗mechanical‘ or digital memory is.
The fascination can be traced back at least to Descartes, but found perhaps its most eerie
‗incarnation‘ in Jacques de Vaucanson‘s automata, the Flute Player and the Pipe Player. The latter
(the player that never got tired albeit playing the pipe at an incredible, ‗inhuman‘ speed)
―embodied the idea that humans were messy, imperfect, fallible, and that a perfect machine would
correct these flaws, improve on humanity.‖ The former however, attempted to resemble the human
imperfection as close as possible. 23
This divide demonstrates the ambiguity inherent in the fascination with machines (or technology
in general) which is often laced with fear of the unknown. If initially designed for entertainment,
the automata deeply disturbed philosophical minds and spurred inflammatory debates, one of the
best known perhaps being Descartes‘ the Treatise on Man. Later on, at the turn of the 18th and
19th centuries, the machines that could be used to replace human labour furthered the research
into automation of life. Jacquard‘s punched card loom, which inspired Charles Babbage‘s 1836
computing Analytical Engine, is often seen as the precursor to the punched card computers from
the mid-20th century. 24 And, significantly, of memory. Considering the Flute Player, for instance,
the ‗programme‘ inside that enabled the automaton to ‗play‘ the instrument is a very raw,
mechanic ‗incarnation‘ of memory.
This is to show that the technology supporting DME has a rather long history and that one has to
be cautious when declaring something ‗new.‘ When a new invention comes along, the sceptics
tend to turn back into the past for the innocence and uncorruptedness of the previous times (and
the olden technologies). Oblivious of the fact that precedent technologies (of externalisation of
thought and memory) at the time of invention or innovation were just as problematic.
22 Gaby Wood, Edison‘s Eve, A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, New York Alfred A. Knopf, 2002,
xvii.
23 Ibid., 25.
24 Geoffrey Batchen, ―Electricity made visible,‖ in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds.), Old media,
new media, A history and theory reader, New York, London, Routledge, 2006, 27–45, 29–30.
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