Man multiplied by the
machine. New mechanical
sense, a fusion of instinct
with the efficiency of motors
and conquered forces.
--F.T. Marinetti

Any of us who has survived Western Civ. II knows that the Industrial Revolution was a landmark in human consciousness. With a new wave of industrialism in the early twentieth century, a similar shift took place in many disciplines. The one on which I intend to focus is that of the visual arts. Beginning around 1900, a new idea flourished in the arts: that a machine was a beautiful thing, at least as worthy of depiction as nature and man, if not more so. This idea manifested itself through diverse groups of artists, most notably the Futurists, in Italy, and the Precisionists, in the United States. Despite their differences, it is helpful to see them synoptically as an extraordinary branch of art, which we may term "The Machine Aesthetic".

The idea of a machine aesthetic encompasses many movements and many artists that cannot be strictly identified with a movement. The common thread is a fascination with the machine and its integral role in modern life. The aesthetic developed most strongly in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when "modernity" was coming ever sharper into contrast with convention. The Italian Futurists are generally recognized as the first movement to come out of this new century of speed, noise, and violence, and to embrace it in their art. In the Manifesto of Futurism, written in 1909, primary Futurist theorist Filippo Marinetti affirms the group's conviction that "a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath--a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful that the Victory of Samothrace."2 The new, the noisy, and the metallic, according to this philosophy, are more vibrant and therefore more to be valued than the greatest masterpieces of the past.

In the hands of the Futurists, mechanical elements might creep in to even the most traditional of subjects, such as a portrait, in the attempt to get at that elusive ideal of beauty, which was now defined in terms of the machine. Umberto Boccioni, the foremost sculptor among the Futurists, explains that "in this way, the cogs of a machine might easily appear out of the armpits of a mechanic, or the lines of a table could cut a reader's head in two."3 As the West came roaring in to a technologically marvellous and complex age, the Futurists were ready and willing to blur the lines between man and machine, between beauty and speed, between adornment and functionality, in the artistic consciousness. To express speed, one of the most important components of a machine aesthetic, most Futurist artists used some of the elements of Cubism, especially geometric figures, choppy, broken planes and a convoluted topography that reflects more a sensation than a realistic mage. The Futurists looked at every shape as something that could be broken down geometrically, described scientifically, and expressed in terms of dynamism. They shared this characteristic with the Precisionists.

The Precisionists were less ideologically cohesive than the Futurists, and they lacked the numerous manifestos and theories that the Italian movement excelled at. However, they shared an interest in the new, gritty, urban, industrial face of America. The first American artist to call himself "Precisionist," Charles Sheeler was perhaps the greatest glorifier of the machine. He has even been called the "artist laureate" of American industrialism.4 From the beginning of his art career in 1903, Sheeler was inspired by all things modern and mechanical. He both painted and photographed the rapidly motorizing country, and in 1920 he made an art film, Manahatta, with photographer Paul Strand. Strand is not considered a Precisionist, but he was a pioneer in abstract photography. Sheeler's paintings exhibit some Cubist characteristics, with planes of light cutting through urban and industrial scenes, but his photography was more conventional in style, if unorthodox in subject. In 1927, he was hired by Ford Motor Company to photograph its Rogue River plant. He never missed an opportunity to sing the praises of industrialization as the backbone of a new, flourishing American society, and the Rogue River project was the perfect venue to apply to machinery the exalted, dignified photographic style that would conventionally be used in portraiture. In fact, Sheeler's photographs often seem very much like portraits of the machines, highlighting their good points and camouflaging their blemishes, portraying them in an individualistic light.

Other Precisionist artists, such as Charles Demuth, whose famous 1928 painting of the numeral 5 includes layer upon layer of foreshortened planes, picked up the Machine Aesthetic's fascination with speed, geometry, and visual force. At a time when many conventional artists were basking in the American landscape, the Precisionists did not turn away from the dirty, impersonal industrial world, but embraced it and made it beautiful. In his History of Beauty, modern-day Renaissance man Umberto Eco identifies the Machine Aesthetic as the machine "having become beautiful and fascinating in itself," continuing "to arouse new anxieties that spring not from its mystique but from the appeal of the  mechanism laid bare."5 The aesthetic value of a machine: this was the revolutionary idea that made its mark on the art world between the wars. No longer pretty or complacent, a class of modern artists looked at the world around them, made beautiful what had been ugly, and made meaningful what had been only functional.

End Notes:

1 One of the objectives of Marinetti's 1913 manifesto of Futurist literature, "Destruction of Syntax -Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom". Tr. R.W. Flint. Futurist Manifestos. Ed. Umbro Apollonio. Viking: New York, 1973. p. 97.

2 Marinetti, F. T. "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909". Tr. R. W. Flint. Futurist Manifestos p. 21.

3 Boccioni, Umberto. "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912". Tr. Robert Brain. Futurist Manifestos pp. 62-63.

4 The Artchive, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/sheeler.html.

5 Eco, Umberto. History of Beauty. Tr. Alastair McEwen. Rizzoli: New York, 2004. p. 394.

Machines are inextricably influential in the cultural reality of the post-industrial world. The contemporary American ideal treats them as an integral part of the most basic actions; from transportation to communication, from learning to eating. To separate oneself from their presence for any amount of time requires nothing short of renunciation. It is no surprise, then, that there has been a proliferation of comparisons drawn to machines in the past few centuries. The value of these comparisons is largely in the scientific realm, where comparing an observed system to a machine with distinct, deliberate parts allows the imposition of a structured comparison to shed light on the functioning of that system. It isn't a stretch to say that the entire post-Enlightenment scientific movement is based on the idea that these types of comparisons are the most valuable way of perceiving any given system. The rational man certainly seems to believe existence can be conquered, understood and ordered, and has acted accordingly.

More recently, this scientific bent has been turned inward, and the field of modern psychology is the result. In the hundred or so years since psychology came into its own as a scientific field, it has taken the place of philosophical musings for the many rational minds drawn to its more verifiable nature. Elaboration on the finer points of psychological understanding isn't necessary to see how the aforementioned mechanical comparisons are able to gain credibility in the psychological community. One such comparison that has found ample acceptance from psychologists is the "computational theory of the mind." The basis of this movement is a comparison between the human mind and a digital computer. Implied in this comparison is the idea that the mind is a system that processes inputs and provides the appropriate outputs.  While this can quickly become a rather cozy comparison, its implications are more than a little unsettling. In a system of direct cause and effect, known inputs lead to known outputs, and a rather cold system of causation develops. The complexity of causes and effects doesn't alter the claim that any thought or action is comprehensible as a direct result of a number of circumstances. What follows is full-fledged determinism, the ramifications of which are not insignificant.

Free will must be written of as an indulgently anthropocentric idea, relegating existence to the meaningless playing-out of a pre-determined course of events. Even harder to swallow is its complete lack of moral responsibility. It certainly doesn't make sense to scold a computer for doing something wrong, and if the mind is simply a computer, it wouldn't make sense to reprimand people for their actions, which are simply the inevitable result of their lives to that point. Thinking like this, any morally reprehensible action can be justified with a simple rationalization. If that weren't enough, the computational theory of the mind fails at explaining ways of thinking that are fairly common. People in general certainly don't seem to act "logically" in every situation they encounter. If this is accounted for by widening the scope of considered causes, the theory loses its strength as a science. If a chemist is examining a reaction and must take into consideration the chemical properties of the universe, or even the whole room, the elegance and value of the science is undermined. The only other way to explain this is that the mind is somehow faulty. While many people are comfortable labeling "insane" people in this way, the implication that all minds are somehow faulty is bound to be uncomfortable. This kind of thinking is only a small step away from a condemnation of the world along the lines of Gnosticism.

If there is one aspect that separates man from machine, then, it seems tied to this failure to adhere strictly to a rational, input-output system of action. People certainly seem able to embody contradiction more readily than anything else, living or mechanical. An angst-filled teen may be convinced that the world is completely turned against him, all the while enjoying the comforts of his parents' home. The yogi may so completely free himself of his ego that his body is the only thing that is identifiably him, but continue to live and act in a world saturated with dualism and large egos. The modern individual can recognize his insignificance spatially and temporally, and still treat himself as the center of the universe. Humans have a creative force that often makes no attempt to abide by rational formulas, or by any convention whatsoever.

John Keats' concept of negative capability offers potent insight into this seemingly contradictory aspect of the human mind. He describes the artist's gift of negative capability as "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." This is something that the dreamers of the world must keep in mind as life becomes further and further rationalized and mechanized. If we allow ourselves to lose touch with that creative, dynamic, contradictory aspect of the mind, we will rapidly become posthuman and the remnants of culture will resemble the cold sterility of the machines we value so much.

There is a robot living in the halls of the Sacred Heart Medical Center. His name is Ruddy. Ruddy delivers medicine to every floor and unit of the hospital. The first time I met him he snuck up behind me and said, "BEEP! I am backing up. Please stand aside." I complied immediately, worried that if I didn't follow his commands he would hurt me. Not that he could hurt me--he moves at speeds of about 2.5 miles per hour. But for whatever reason, I'm a little frightened of Ruddy.

If Ruddy was a real person, I would probably really like him. He's kind of squat, and always very polite. Yet I can only imagine how terrifying he would be if his patient, polite tones matched a patient, polite robot smile and if his stout, slow-moving exterior belied an easy-going robot personality. The fact is, despite all his lovely personality traits, Ruddy is and always will be a fake. Why are we so appalled with the idea of artificial intelligence? What is so menacing about a machine that thinks and even feels as we do? Why is it that in so many Science Fiction books and films the mere existence of a robot poses a threat to the entire human race? In a speech entitled "The Android and the Human," Philip K. Dick argued that "the absence of something vital--that is the horrific part, the apocalyptic vision of a nightmare future."1 But what is that vital something that only we humans can possess? A soul? Please.

Many theorists seem eager to dismiss at the notion of "human-as-machine." N. Katherine Hayles, author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, said in an interview, "It is by no means clear that human thought does operate in the same way as computer calculation, and computers can never experience emotions in anything like the same way humans do."2 But why can't machines feel? Certainly they can't feel now--we have neither the capacity to understand nor the technology to replicate our human emotions. However, there may come a day when we will have the ability to reproduce these emotions. If and when that day comes, who are we to say those emotions wouldn't be real?

Dick spent much of his career exploring the notion of android emotion, and for the most part he remained skeptical. Indeed, in the "The Android and the Human," he went out of his way to taunt the idea. "A time may come," he said, "when, if a man tries to rape a sewing machine, the sewing machine will have him arrested and testify, perhaps even a little hysterically, against him in court."3 The fact that Dick would joke about rape seems to indicate he didn't take the sewing machine's feelings seriously. I do take the sewing machine's feelings seriously. That may sound a little absurd. However, what is important is the feelings, not the person or being or even inanimate object that is feeling them. The emotions legitimate themselves.

From where do these emotions and feelings spring? Of course, from a machine they would come from a program--Hysteria 2.0 or Manic 3000--from codes and numbers. Most people don't take the idea of android emotion seriously because they can't imagine that our own feelings could possibly stem from the same sort of programs.

However, just because we cannot imagine something does not mean it cannot be true. Perhaps our emotions are, as a posthumanist might argue, "the result of a number of autonomous agents running their programs more or less independently of one another. Complex behavior in this view is an emergent property that arises when these programs, each fairly simple in itself, begin reacting with one another."4 Maybe there is no special, intangible "something" that makes us all human. Maybe what makes us human is the unique arrangement of "programs" within us.  No matter how much it displeases Philip K. Dick and others, we could just be machines. I hope this news doesn't depress anyone. Actually, we should be relieved--if humanity ever manages to develop androids with emotions, there will be nothing to fear. They'll be just like us! But for some reason I still can't stand to be in the same room as Ruddy.

End Notes:

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner

3 Dick, Philip K. "The Android and the Human." Vancouver SF Convention. University of British Columbia, Vancouver. March, 1972. <http://www.philipkdickfans.com>

4 Borgmann, Albert and N. Katherine Hayles. "An interview / dialogue with Albert Borgmann and N. Katherine Hayles on humans and machines." University of Chicago Press. 1999. <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html>

What is it all for? Life, that is. Why are we here? What should we do? These questions are eternal and can take a lifetime to answer. The first philosophers were the ones who asked them, but millennia since Socrates first declared that humans are meant to act with justice, the field of philosophy is still very alive as new ideas and theories continue to be created and old ones are attacked. People still cannot agree on what they should do or even upon the definitions of important terms, and any answer to the question of what one should do has grown progressively more complex as the rapid evolution of machines and technology make more human activities possible than ever before.

Not merely has technology freed humanity from the earth to fly in the sky with and even above the birds but it has also allowed it to break free from the Earth itself and enter space. Communications have developed from handwritten letters that could take days to reach their destination in the next city over to bits of data that can instantaneously reach any point on the globe.

The realm of those activities which fell under ‘cannot' as recently as a decade ago and were thus irrelevant to the question "What should I do?" has shrunk to the extent that some now seriously ponder whether humanity may one day find itself completed uninhibited, able to do anything. Largely, this progress has been lauded. The growth of human potential through technology has only rarely faced criticisms so strong that they have demanded it be halted. Most criticisms, rather, have focused upon proceeding with caution, ensuring that humanity is mature enough for the possibilities that await it. It is the styles of the former criticisms which most interest me, and my response to them is what forms the core of this essay. The most famous of these extreme critics are the Luddites, those English textile workers of the early 19th century who destroyed the powered looms which had made them unnecessary. The government's response to these radicals was swift. Tens of thousands of soldiers were deployed, and those who were convicted of destroying the machines were either executed or deported to Australia. It is the extreme and violent nature of the workers' response that cemented the Luddites place in history, but there have been other movements in opposition to technological growth which demanded the same turn away from machines.

In the latter half of the 19th century, decades after the Luddites were put down, the beliefs of John Ruskin incited the English Arts and Crafts movement. Dismayed by the low quality and aesthetics of those things produced en masse by machine, a counter-movement which celebrated production by the individual craftsman over the tool arose. In a similar vein, the highly marketed and popular organic food movement of today extols the virtues of produce grown without the use of genetic modification or artificial chemicals. As with so many things, the motives behind these movements are many. Behind Arts and Crafts lies a concern for the loss of skilled, creative workers as men became slaves to what should be their tools, the machines, and issues central to the organic foods movement include environmental sustainability, food safety and corporate accountability. Both, though, share a deep-seated interest in seeing that the method of production is not separated from the product. For the proponents of both, there is value in the means and to turn the means away from humans and over to machines is to lose it.

And, in this, both movements, to the extent that they were and continue to be industries, miss the point. As a consumer society, all we buy are products, and they can never become anything more to us. We already are completely separated from the means of production, so it matters not if the organic apples at Safeway were planted, watered and picked by hand or if the consumer was the first contact they ever had with humans. Aside from any quantitative or qualitative differences in quality, this narrative of natural growth so emphasized by the natural foods movement and of individual human creation promoted by the Arts and Crafts movement means nothing to the people who never played a part in it. If there is to be any value in production, it must come from the consumer itself. They must be both producer and consumer. They cannot allow others to create meaning for them. They must create and find meaning by themselves as they do grow and prepare their own foods in lieu of setting the timer on a microwaveable meal or design and craft their own art and decorations instead of buying whatever is on sale at Pottery Barn.

Almost certainly the quality of these personally made things will be of less quality then those available for purchase in the beginning. But, as one pursues these practices of self-production, the quality will inevitably increase with experience, and as the opportunity for personalization is at its height when one produces for themself, the quality will surpass that of anything at a store. This is an ideal, meant to be struggled for but rarely attained and, one may argue, impossible to reach in modern America. The demand for resources increases wildly as one personally performs all stages of production, and this world with a population of over 6 billion people and more everyday does not have enough to supply every person who wants to be their own producer. And so we return to how technology has increased human potential by breaking natural barriers.

Mere decades ago, imagining a population of this immensity was impossible. Verily, in The Population Bomb, Paul Erlich predicted in 1968 that population pressures and a limited amount of produce would cause hundreds of millions to die before 1990, but technological innovations in agriculture and food-related industries support billions today. To turn wholesale to self-subsistence would radically increase the need for resources and may very well lead to the famines predicted by Erlich. Thus, I suggest a middle way. If one is to find value in the means of production, they must participate in it, but they do not necessarily need to participate in producing everything they consume. Cultivating a small garden that can be reasonably maintained in a single room increases an appreciation for the energy that goes into the raw foods that make up their every meal. Visiting those places which practice classic means of farming and furniture creation, and joining in with them where possible, is another way of discovering the true value of what one consumes. Without an authentic, first-hand knowledge of the means of production, they can never hold meaning to a consumer.

They say that everyone has their obsessions. I think that this is, largely, true, but I think it's also true that not all obsessions are created equal. And while the question of whether my obsession is more or less absurd than any other particular fixation is an open one, I will say that my love of technology has undoubtedly reached ridiculous proportions. Like all obsessions of any merit, my unapologetic love of gadgetry and the material new has been dressed up in the fineries of Greek, thus allowing me to refer to myself not merely as a "geek," but rather as a "technophile." 

Many people have a very hard time understanding technophilia. This isn't at all surprising, since it can often be a fairly ridiculous obsession. We feel a compulsive need for machines which are not only entirely superfluous, but are often more trouble than they're worth. We buy palm pilots and smart phones to manage contact information and calendars already adequately managed by more conventional solutions. We spend countless hours drooling over sites like ThinkGeek and Gizmodo. We engage in over-the-top "early adopter" behavior, clamoring to get the Next Big Thing the second it hits the market (and resenting to have to wait even that long.) 

Simply put, technophilia is the love of or obsession with technology. Technophiles like myself love the latest gadget not because it makes our lives easier or lets us do nifty things but simply because it's the latest gadget. We know we don't really need a blue-tooth enabled toaster that we can control from our cellphone, but we'll covet it anyway. And if we do wind up buying it, most of us will play with it for a little while, then shove it away in a cupboard somewhere, never to use it again. Either that or install Linux on it. Our relationship with our gadgets has taken that unhealthy step from "using" to "loving." 

This has a wide array of consequences. On the positive side, technophiles tend to be on pretty good terms with the muses of technology. We get pretty good at working with (often finicky) new toys and tend to be able to make things Just Work. On the other hand, we're likely to spend our rent money on unnecessary technological absurdities (pocket-sized wireless network detector, anyone?). 

My particular form of technophilia is especially insipid. I'm a computer hardware geek. I can (and, much to my loved ones' chagrin, do) talk at length and with great zeal about transistor size and the number of cores in a processor, or about the CAS latencies of my new RAM. I spent a recent Friday night refining my BIOS settings to get the best performance out my processor. Let me repeat that again, lest an earnest reader mistake it for a joke: I spent a Friday night shut up in my room trying to get my computer to work just a little bit better. It worked just fine the way it was. I just thought I could squeeze a few more hertz out of it. Clearly not the actions of a well-adjusted young man.

But for as much glee as my computers and my gadgets give me, I have to admit that my fixation is the height of absurdity. Because as I said before, what hooks me and others like me is not what a particular item can do for us, but simply the fact that it's new. The sheer newness of something doesn't say anything about how good or valuable or helpful it is. Quite the contrary, when new technologies come out they tend to be buggy and inefficient. As a general rule the role of the early adopter is fraught with malfunctions and break downs. And yet whenever a tech company comes out with their latest product, there's a resounding chorus of "Oooh, Shiny!" from the technophiles of the world. And yet if we're honest with ourselves, we can come up with dozens, if not hundreds of examples of inventions or gadgets which, to put it bluntly, sucked. Or even simply those that sucked at first, needing months or even years to get all the kinks ironed out (and invariably dropping in price as they did so.)

But no matter how often we get burned (the wireless network detector doesn't work all that well and I never was able to eke any extra performance out of my computer, despite hours of work), we will keep questing after the latest and greatest that technology has to offer. We will keep doing it because every once in awhile we truly do get the Next Big Thing. The little widget that redefines for the better the way our world works. And it's those inventions that eventually trickle down and rewire our society and our world, which is an amazing effect to see. But it's hard to see unless you've been there since the beginning. 

So just think, for every few hundred thousand cell phone users today, there was a technophile back in the 1980s who looked at a heavy, awkward brick of plastic and thought: "You mean I can make calls from anywhere?" , and shelled out much more than he or she should to buy a cell phone that was unwieldy and unreliable. Realistically, our technophilic cell phone purchaser really should have waited a decade or so until prices dropped, the phones became reliable, and the cell networks expanded. And so they were stuck looking like a dork with a ridiculous, ill-functioning brick of plastic. But they were happy with their new, barely functional phone, and to this day many of them will, whenever they place a call on their GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled satellite smart phone, think back on that first cell phone with a real sense of fond nostalgia.

And so I, and many others like me, will continue to spend money we don't have and time we can't afford to lose looking for, acquiring, and tinkering with shiny new toys that either don't do anything useful, or will, in a few years, do what they do better, faster, and cheaper. So, please, take the example of the cell phone early adopter as a lesson, and next time you see someone wielding some improbable trinket of technology, which doesn't work very well, and seems entirely impractical; don't take it simply as a sign of a disordered soul, madly in love with its toys, but also a potential glimmer of things to come.