Sketches of Eastenders as Conceptualised by H.R Giger and Directed by David Cronenberg

Many of the YouTube channels displaying AI art show imaginary scenes from SF films and TV as if they were made by different directors and conceptual artists. So there’s Star Trek as created by Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, Dune as conceived by H.R. Giger and Star Wars as done by all the above plus Alejandro Jodorowski the Franco-Chilean comics writer and surrealist film maker, or otherwise in the style of 60s Surrealist Science Fiction. I can’t say I’m a fan of Eastenders, and it’s seemed to me for a long time that the soap would be more interesting to me, as a Science Fiction fan, if it had been designed by Giger, the artist who gave the world the Xenomorph of the Alien movies and Sil of the Species franchise, and directed by body horror maestro David Cronenberg. He’s the director behind such grim epics as Videodrome, about an underground TV channel specialising in murder, torture and sex, that produces disturbing hallucinations in its viewers; the Fly, in which David Goldblum turned into a humanoid insect after an accident with a teleportation device; Crash, about perverts getting their kicks from motor accidents; and the Naked Lunch. Very loosely based on the book by William S. Burroughs, this is about a pest exterminator who gets hooked on the ketamine he uses to kill the bugs and goes through a series of bizarre hallucinations. These include mugwumps, reptilian alien creatures, and a gay typewriter-beetle. One of his earlier films was The Brood, in which a psychologically disturbed woman exteriorises her trauma so that it warps her flesh, generating murderous homunculi. With those two designing and directing the chronicles of Albert Square, the soap would definitely become more interesting, but possibly only to horror and SF fans. Others may well be put off.

So, I sketched out for myself a few ideas of what Eastenders and its characters might look like with Giger and Cronenberg at the helm. These include Barbara Windso, the Queen Vic’s barmaid, as a Giger-esque alien growing out of the bar, Dot Cotton andPat Butcher as creatures like Sil from Species, and the flesh of one of the Mitchell brothers warping and twisting while a mugwump looks over his shoulder. I don’t know if you can see it, but on the second sketch of the Windsor creature I did the handles of the pumps as elongated babies, following their appearance in Giger’s art. And the bottles in the optics are supposed to be bio-engineered organs like the technology that appears in Cronenberg’s Existenz and following Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic. No, I’m not trying to give anyone nightmares, just having fun crossing genres. Besides, some of the storylines in Eastenders set in the real world are far more horrific than anything created from latex rubber and CGI animation.

Robots Now Set to Replace Lollipop Men and Women?

This very short video comes from the Clown Planet channel on YouTube. Clown Planet features various news reports of unusual, and unusually daft incidents. It’s also highly critical of some of the advances in robotics. A recent video was about the driverless bus being tested somewhere, with the explicit statement in the title ‘No Thanks’. I think it’s also put up clips from news coverage of robot dogs and security robots being used by the police in New York and on the city’s metro. This clip is of a robot that’s clearly been designed to act as a mechanised lollipop man. One of the commenters to the video,@sparesomechange8080, pretty much described it accurately thus ‘So this is basically an overly engineered, overly complicated, expensive traffic light?’ Yes, it looks very much like a traffic light on wheels. Another commenter, @ivaniuk123 also remarked, ‘A 100k robot for something that can be done with an unpaid volunteer.’ Which I think is a good assessment of it. And @ukgareth316 said, ‘Speaking as an school crossing patrol officer that has enough of an issue getting traffic to stop at the best of times there is no way that robot will not get run over or drove past and into people crossing the road.’ Another commenter predicted that drivers would deliberately crash into it. They’d be stupid if they did, but I can see that the temptation would be there.

This seems to be a tech company demonstrating that it can do something, rather than actually supplying a machine that answers a real need. And there is a problem with advances in AI and robotics making people redundant. We’ve already seen various companies getting rid of human workers and writers in favour of ChatGPT and there are similar predictions that the computer art programmes like Midjourney will decimate artists. Now it seems the tech companies want to show that they can replace the lollipop people.

David Starkey Claims the Left Want to Replace the Holocaust with Black Lives Matter to Destroy Western, White Culture

David Starkey is also one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference, and once again has stirred up controversy because of his comments on race. According to the Independent, the Tudor historian said that the left is jealous of the Holocaust and wants to replace it with Black Lives Matter. And they’re not interested in protecting Black lives, but it tearing down western, White culture. The article says

‘Left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery, a leading historian has said.

In a speech to the National Conservatism conference in London, David Starkey claimed that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust”.

He said: “The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.”

The historian’s comments brought swift condemnation, with Daniel Sugarman, public affairs director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, tweeting that they were “pathetic attempts to drive a wedge between communities” that “will not work”.’…

‘In his speech to the National Conservatism conference on Wednesday, Dr Starkey renewed his criticism of Black Lives Matter, denying that the movement cared about black lives at all.

To applause from the audience, he said: “Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.

“They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.

“The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.”

He added: “The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.”’

Starkey’s wrong about the left seeking to replace the Holocaust with slavery, but he does have a point about Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter being used to discredit White culture. Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour, was unfairly charged with anti-Semitism by the witch-hunters in the Labour party a few years ago because she dared to ask questions about how other genocides, such as the Black Holocaust of slavery, would be commemorated as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. She said this in a Labour party workshop about the proper commemoration of the Day, which stated that there would be no restrictions on what anyone could say. I think she’s technically wrong to describe transatlantic slavery as a holocaust. The Holocaust and similar genocides are deliberate attempts to wipe out nations and ethnicities. That wasn’t the case with transatlantic slavery, which aimed at the forced use of the enslaved peoples’ labour. This doesn’t remove the fact, however, that the violence and cruelty involved in the transatlantic slave trade was horrendous and it contributed to increased warfare and conflict in Africa, as tribes competed to capture slaves to sell to Europeans. The ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Day also include the remembrance of other genocides, and Walker definitely did not want to replace the Holocaust with the slave trade, merely add it to the other atrocities also commemorated. Walker’s case, which was an attempt to silence a long term and principled critic of Israel, is the only one I know that comes anywhere close to a demand to replace the Holocaust with the commemoration of slavery. And she didn’t do that. When left-wingers have denounced the commemoration of the Holocaust, it’s been because of the way it is used as a propaganda device to muster support for Israel against the Palestinians. Who are being ethnically cleansed from their traditional home.

Starkey has much more of a point with Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Black Lives Matter was a response to a deep felt issue – what was perceived as racism in the American police which resulted in the greater shooting of Blacks. In fact, Black and other Conservatives have challenged this, and shown that more police get shot than Blacks, and more Whites are shot and killed by cops than Blacks. The organisation itself is Marxist, and rejects capitalism and the traditional family. In America, it’s also been rocked by scandal as its leader, Patrice Cullors, has used the millions donated to the organisation to enrich herself, her relatives and lieutenants. There have been a couple of similar scandals in Britain. A Black Lives Matter activist from Bristol is being sued for similarly taking donations. And a few days ago it was reported that the British Film Institute is taking a BLM-supporting film maker to court. She received funding from them to produce a documentary about Black liberation and the BLM movement, but hasn’t done so. Moderate and Conservative Black commenters have also criticised BLM for ignoring the problem of Black on Black violence and killing, which seriously afflicts many Black communities in America and Britain. Innocent Black people are still being murdered, but the movement ignores those lives unless the killers are White.

At the same time, Critical Race Theory holds that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that automatically gives White people a privileged position in western society, which is intrinsically and systematically racist. The amount of racism in western society hasn’t changed, but only become more hidden. Hence demands to ‘destroy White privilege’ and for Whites to ‘be less White’. Slavery has become part of this, because the current disadvantaged state of Black communities in America and Britain is attributed to the slave trade and its legacy. Hence the demands for reparations. And yes, it is being used to delegitimise those nations. The 1619 Project about the influence of slavery and racism in America deliberately took that date as part of its name, because it considers it the true date of the founding of America. This was when the first Black slaves were imported into the nascent British colonies. At the same time, Britain is also coming in for criticism because of slavery and imperialism. For campaigners, the two or intrinsically linked, despite the fact that the later British empire and its annexation of Africa was partly motivated by a crusading zeal to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. Apart from the toppling of slavers like Edward Colston in Bristol, there are campaigns by Critical Social Justice activists to censor art and literature connected to slavery. And one of the problems is that slavery and imperialism is framed as something that only Whites do to people of colour. One of the arguments used by the slave-owners against the abolitionists was that slavery had been practised across the world down through history, and its abolition would leave Britain vulnerable to other nations and empires that had no such moral scruples. I’ve put up videos from the Arab, Turkish and Iranian world about their Black citizens, who also have their origins in those countries’ slave trades. Dubai, to its credit, has a museum to its history of slavery and slave trading. But few in the west seem to be aware of this and there is an active opposition amongst western anti-racism campaigner to tackling the resurgence of real slavery in Africa and elsewhere in the world. One of the left-wing writers in the I, Emma Maltby, rejected such demands as a distraction from the goal of achieving racial equality in the west. And Critical Postcolonial Theory rejects any criticism of extra-European societies traditional cultures as racist. Radical ideologies like Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory are part of the wider movement of Critical Theory which is a postmodernist revision of Marxism that seeks to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy and the gender binary as part of the intersectional leftism called for by the German-American Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s.

I’m not a fan of Starkey, and he’s way off with his complaint about leftists trying to replace the Holocaust with slavery. But he does have a point in that slavery is being used as an ideological weapon against traditional western culture as part of a wider, postmodern assault on the Enlightenment values of individualism, rationality and reasoned debate. And this not only bothers those on the right, like Starkey, but also people on the left, like Helen Pluckrose, one of the trio of critics of Postmodernism and its assault on western culture with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They have pointed out that CRT and related ‘isms’ differ strongly from the traditional anti-racism and feminist movements.

You can therefore criticise them without necessarily wanting the extremely right-wing economic and social order called for by people like Starkey.

For the Independent article, go to: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/left-wing-wants-to-replace-holocaust-with-black-lives-matter-says-david-starkey/ar-AA1biu58?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=dcceda18ad0848e7b25a84d6a580c758&ei=52

Oh Horror! Vandals Eat Art Installation!

This is extremely funny. Or at least it is to my twisted sense of humour. Sky News reported yesterday that a terrible act of philistine artistic vandalism had occurred. You may remember the controversy some time ago when a very modern artist exhibited his latest installation, which was a banana taped to the gallery wall. Now some amateur art critic has defaced it by taking of the tape and eating the banana. Apparently it was an art student, who said he felt hungry. Afterwards he said that he always felt that the works of the Italian artist responsible for the installation represented rebellion, but that there could also be a rebellion against the rebellion. Oh, the horror! Actually, I think it’s brilliant and exactly what this type of pretentious pseudery needs. It needs to be mocked and ridiculed, and if people deface it like that, then it only exposes even further its threadbare and specious nature. Some of us can remember the outcry from Tracey Emin back in the ’90s or Noughties when a couple of young Chinese chaps climbed on her bed at the Tate and bounced around on it. I also heard that they were arrested before they could get Francis Picabia’s urinal and use it for the purpose it was originally intended. Well, that urinal has been around since 1919 and was a caustic joke at the expense of the artistic establishment. It was a Dadaist comment on European culture, which in the view of the Dadaists, had been responsible for the terrible war that had just been fought. It was anti-art, but it’s been celebrated ever since as some kind of deep, incisive comment about art. I suppose it’s funny if you’re young and fancy yourself as a bit of an iconoclast mocking the sensibilities and artistic orthodoxies of your elders. But it’s now become something of an artistic icon itself, and seems to me to be just puerile instead of anything deeper or more significant. It was a joke, and not a very good one, but is now held up as an important piece of 20th century art by an artistic establishment that doesn’t have much of a sense of humour when its sensibilities are lampooned. I think the Russian Futurist poet Mayakovsky gave the game away when he titled a volume of his poems A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Such avant-garde works were all about shocking popular taste. Sometimes there really is a point to such challenging works, and the artistic experiments of the avant-garde produce genuinely interesting and stimulating art. But not always. And much avant-garde contemporary art just strikes me as banal. What seems to sustain it is the conservatism of parts of the artistic establishment and the ingenuity of the artists and critics in providing justifications for these pieces, in which they give reasons why the most unlikely object or installation is somehow a piece of staggering genius.

In fact, I think there are some really interesting and really skilful artistic works being produced, but they’re by people away from the artistic establishment, by amateur artists, commercial illustrators and the designers of computer games and films. I think the works of these artists deserve greater appreciation, rather than the exhibits of modern official art.

New Scientist Announce Film Made by AI Art Programme – A Threat To Human Creativity?

I’ll admit I do enjoy looking at some of the videos on YouTube of art created by various AI programmes. Mostly there of the type ‘what if Star Wars, or another popular film or TV series was in the style of H.R. Giger or some other artist?’ It is fascinating to see what these machines produce. But I am also uncomfortable with the implications. The programmes produce fascinating, complex works of art without human agency, although they are based on the works of existing artists. Some have accused them of plagiarism, and there’s also the threat of unemployment to real, working human artists. I am also disquieted by the implications that artistic creativity may not be limited to humanity but can be produced by machines.

A few days ago, New Scientist announced that a film had been produced using these art programmes. It was about an AI trying to help the last survivor of humanity. I can remember that films of this sort were predicted nearly four decades ago in a late night TV series about the possibilities of computing presented or starring Jonathan Powell. One of its predictions was films produced without human actors. I don’t know if this new film has no real actors in it, or whether it still needs humans to produce the characters’ voices. But with the rise of deep fake movies, where it is nearly impossible to tell a computer-generated image from reality, it does seem to me that we are very near that particularly prediction about future movies. The Science Fiction film The Congress also suggested the same possibility a few years ago. This was a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, about an academic who finds himself transported into a decaying future, whose reality is disguised from the population by hallucinogenic drugs. The film, however, changes it so that the decaying society is a product of the mass use of a drug that produces a consensual hallucinatory world. The heroine is a real Hollywood actress, playing a version of herself, who signs away her image so that a series of movies are made starring her by computers, but which she isn’t actually in herself. The deep fakes are a sign that the technology is there to make this a possibility as well.

So while the film interests me, I am worried about what it implies for human art and the film industry, and whether they will be a casualty of the rise of such technology.

March for Palestine Demo on May 13th

I go this yesterday from Labour & Palestine:

‘March for Palestine!

Join us in London on Saturday May 13 & take these 3 easy steps to build our bloc & the demo:

• RSVP here
• Share & invite friends here
• Retweet & spread the word here

The Palestinian people need our solidarity now more than ever. We will be joining fellow Labour members & affiliated trade unionists who will be joining this protest march and rally for Palestine taking place on Saturday 13th May 2023 in central London.

The march is supported by numerous trade unions including Artists’ Union England, BFAWU, CWU, The MU, NEU, PCS, RMT, TSSA, UCU, UNISON, Unite the Union.

FREE PALESTINE – END APARTHEID – END THE OCCUPATION

GENERAL DEMO INFO:

• Date: Saturday 13 May 2023
• Time: 12pm
• Location: The BBC, Portland Place W1A, London

Organised by: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Muslim Association of Britain, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Supported by Artists’ Union England, BFAWU, CWU, The MU, NEU, PCS, RMT, TSSA, UCU, UNISON, Unite the Union.

The March is also commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Nakba when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes and villages in 1948.

More demo info can be found on the PSC Website here.‘

I can’t go, but I’m putting this up for anyone who can.

Eygptian YouTuber’s Criticism of Netflix’s Portrayal of a Black Cleopatra

Early today I put up a post about an Egyptian lawyer suing Netflix because its documentary about Cleopatra cast her as a Black woman. He isn’t alone in his objection. There are reports that the Egyptians put up a petition on Change.org condemning the documentary. This garnered 85,000 signatures before it was taken down by the internet petitioning organisation for breaking their community guidelines. This video comes from the Fun Killing King channel on YouTube. It’s by an Egyptian, who lays out the historical reasons why Cleopatra wasn’t Black. She was descended from the Ptolemies, descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. They practised incest and lived in Lower Egypt, so they were probably weren’t racially mixed. If they were, the Egyptians with whom they would have intermarried would have been lighter skinned than those further south. Contemporary portraits of her show her with Caucasian features. He states, though, that as a Mediterranean woman she would probably have been darker skinned than the Romans.

He also makes the point that Egypt was very mixed in the racial composition of its citizens. Some were White, but others, particularly in the south, had more sub-Saharan African citizens. This is demonstrated in their art and statuary. He shows the tomb paintings the Egyptian middle class commissioned c. 300 AD, which show many of their subjects as Mediterranean rather Black African. He is annoyed at outsiders appropriating Egyptian history for themselves, and blames Jayda Pinknett Smith, Will Smith’s wife, who is an Afrocentrist and one of the show’s producers and its narrator.

He states at the outset that he is has no objections to Black leads, and later argues that documentaries like Nefflix’s, which appropriate ancient Egypt for Black Americans, overlook real Black history. They ignore the Kushite Black pharaohs, who conquered and ruled Egypt and its empire in the Middle East until they were finally defeated and expelled. They also ignore later, powerful African empires like Mansa Musa’s in Mali. The Fun Killing King compares the Afrocentric portrayal of Cleopatra to the Kushite invasion at one point, which adds further evidence that at least some Egyptians see this as a colonialist enterprise.

Avaaz on Protests and Events against Climate Change in London Tomorrow and through the Weekend

Dear friends in the UK,

This weekend, London will see what might be the biggest climate mobilisation in British history!

Avaaz is supporting an amazing coalition, including Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as well as hundreds of community groups and tens of thousands of people, to come together over four days to pressure politicians to take urgent action to tackle the escalating climate crisis.

Avaazers will be there, and there’s exciting things to get involved with all weekend.

• On Friday 21st, starting at 1030AM, there will be an opening ceremony outside Parliament and “People’s Pickets” at government departments across Westminster. 
• On Saturday 22nd, starting at 10AM, there will be a massive rally outside Parliament with art, music, talks from experts and activities for kids, culminating in a family-friendly march for biodiversity and nature.
• On Sunday 23rd, starting at 10AM outside Parliament, there will be faith-based events, as well as actions alongside the London Marathon to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
• On Monday 24th, as politicians return to Westminster, there will be events all day, culminating in a mass picket outside Parliament from 4-6PM.

The full details of the programme can be found here. Hope you can make it this weekend to make your voice heard!

In hope and determination,

Luis, Bert, Aloys and the entire Avaaz team

PS: The aim of this action is not to create public disruption, but to create a massive show of public demand for urgent action on the climate crisis. Organisers are working closely with the police, who have affirmed our right to protest peacefully.  ‘

Egyptian Lawyer Suing Netflix for Portraying Cleopatra as Black

Netflix has caused a bit of controversy this week with its documentary about the legendary queen of Egypt by having her played by a Black actor. This is unhistorical, as the real Cleopatra was Greek, descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Ptolemy had set himself up as pharaoh after Alexander’s death. I’ve also heard the claim today that she also had red hair. There have been a number of posts by bloggers and vloggers across the Net showing that Netflix got it wrong. And now, apparently, an Egyptian lawyer is so angry about it and the threat it presents to Egyptian identity that he’s suing Netflix. He also wants the streaming service banned in Egypt because its content is contrary to Islam, and especially Egyptian Islam.

His argument is that the portrayal of Cleopatra as a woman of colour is Afrocentric, and derives from that ideology’s doctrine that the originally ancient Egyptians were wholly Black and only became lighter through later invasion and immigration. This is a correct description of the Afrocentric view of ancient Egypt, although some leading Afrocentrists, like Cheikh Anta Diop, also thought that the ancient Egyptians were a racial mixture of Black and White. The idea that the ancient Egyptians and thus Cleopatra were Black is fervently held by very many western Blacks. The Black activist Akala gave a talk to the Oxford Union a few years ago arguing for the view. The contrary view, that the ancient Egyptians were light-skinned Caucasians, is dismissed as a colonialist doctrine intended to deny Blacks knowledge of their true history. There’s a weird conspiracy theory added to this. I’ve heard Blacks claim that White, British authorities deliberately chopped the lips and noses off ancient Egyptian statues in order to disguise their negritude.

The lawyer is not just angry at Neflix’s portrayal of Egypt’s most famous queen, but he also fears that this is a truly colonialist attitude that will lead to the displacement of his people from their homeland. He states that Afrocentrism is a doctrine that teaches specifically Black Americans that they are the true Egyptians and demands their return to Egypt. This is certainly true of a number of Black Muslim sects, beginning with the Moorish Science Temple. However, he adds that this return to Egypt is also coupled with a call to expel or displace the present indigenous Egyptian population. I’ve done some reading on Afrocentrism, and haven’t found that as an Afrocentric doctrine. The founders of Black American Islam seem to have claimed to be either Egyptian, or to have been told the true history of ancient Egypt during visits to the country by Egyptian holy men. I haven’t come across any doctrine in the Afrocentric religions calling for the disinheritance and ethnic cleansing of present-day Egyptians. The insistence that the ancient Egyptians were Black has caused friction at some Egyptological conferences and symposia held in Egypt, but I’m not aware of anything more serious.

I’m not a Muslim, so I can’t comment whether Netflix’s content is contrary to Islam or not. Some Islamic countries, such as Iran, have very strict rules regarding what may be shown on the screen. Violence is forbidden along with relationships between men and women. Hence a few years ago there was a spate of Iranian movies about the adventures of children. Other Muslim countries have different attitudes. When Dallas was still a force on global TV, I was surprised by a statement from one of the Gulf Arab states that the show was enjoyed by its people, and they felt that Patrick Duffy’s character exemplified proper Muslim values. That must have been before the character had an adulterous affair. The accusation that Neftlix is contrary to Islam therefore seems to me to be an extra allegation just to get the service banned in Egypt. The real reason is the documentary’s perceived insult and threat to Egyptian ethnic identity.

It seems to me that the problem is that Netflix wanted to please Black American ideas about ancient Egypt, ignoring how the Egyptians themselves saw their identity. This is a form of colonialism. One of the doctrines of Critical Race Theory is ‘epistemic violence’, which holds that White supremacy denies the colonised, darker peoples a voice and the ability to describe their position. Well, this is clearly what the portrayal of Cleopatra as Black for Afrocentric reasons has done, although I doubt this would be recognised by Critical Race Theorists, for whom the victims of such violent colonialist discourse are always Black. This controversy is itself another refutation of Critical Race Theory.

18th Century Automaton that Writes and Draws

Here’s another short video from the Met YouTube channel from the Metropolitan Museum of Art about automatons. This one is housed in the Franklin Institute, and is able to draw four pictures and write three poems, two in French and one in English. The machine’s movements are smooth, unlike the stereotypically jerky movements supposedly characteristic of robots and machines. The automaton has the largest mechanical memory of such machines, reading its movements off from brass discs contained in its mechanism. The blurb for the video runs:

‘Androids capable of writing and drawing, which embodied Enlightenment ideas about links between mechanical and human action, continue to inspire poets, artists, and engineers to this day. This creation became the basis for Brian Selznick’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), which Martin Scorsese adapted into the award-winning film Hugo (2011). Long a mystery, the android’s maker was revealed during restoration in the twentieth century; when the clockwork motor is set in motion, the figure signs his drawing “the automaton of Maillardet.” Maillardet hid the mechanics of his lifelike Draughtsman-Writer, a seamless blend of art and science, in a cabinet rather than in the figure. This allowed for larger machinery and greater memory than in earlier efforts: an unprecedented three poems and four drawings are translated by the action of the figure, through a technology that foretold the computer.

Featured Artwork: Henry Maillardet (Swiss, born 1745). The Draughtsman-Writer, ca. 1800. Brass, steel, wood, fiber. Franklin Institute, Philadelphia’

One of the continental inventors of such machines, it may have been Vaucanson or Droz, also produced one that wrote. However, the discs could be taken out and rearranged to change what it wrote. This made the automaton a truly programmable robot.

The ingenuity in such devices truly amazes me, and I do wonder what their inventors would have been capable of if they had our technology.