Da Vinci Automata

Here is a Clockpunk novel, Alchemy of Stone, that I came to know of recently. The novelist, Ekaterina Sedia is a US novelist of Russian origin. I loved the tagline “A novel of automated anarchy and clockwork lust.” Clockwork lust? Where was I when they invented that? Here is the product description from Amazon.

Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets - secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. However, this doesn’t sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart - literally!

Killbox has a Flickr Set on Clockpunk related images. Aesthetically pleasing and would definitely put a smile on any Clockpunker’s face.

The New York Times has a nice article about mechanics in the pre-renaissance era and how the ancients thought about Mechanics. Its worth a read. It is definitely relevant to anyone interested in writing Clockpunk. Its a window for us into the minds of the ancient equivalent of mechanical engineers i.e., people like Archimedes. Thanks to Meika for pointing this out. Here is an excerpt.

Dr. Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin as his day job and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun. He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.

The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.

There are a surprising number of old, and extremely old, scientific texts that have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid’s geometry, Hero of Alexandria’s Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo’s 17th-century defense of a heliocentric solar system.

The nice thing for Dr. Schiefsky is that hardly anyone reads the stuff. Scientists generally are not into ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Arabic, and most of Dr. Schiefsky’s colleagues work on literature, philosophy, philology or archaeology. In fact, Dr. Schiefsky suggests “about 100 people” worldwide work on both science and the classics.

By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory. The practical use comes first, theory second. Artisans build machines and use them but do not think about why they work. Theorists explain the machines and then derive principles that can be used to construct more complex machines.

The Archimedes researchers say that by studying this dialectic they can better understand what people knew about the natural world at a given time and how that knowledge may have affected their lives.

“What do you do when you want to weigh a 100-pound piece of meat and you don’t have a 100-pound counterweight?” Dr. Schiefsky asked. “You use an unequal-armed balance, with a small weight on the long arm and the meat on the short arm.”

The uneven balance, known as a steelyard, is a kind of lever, and Dr. Schiefsky notes that it has a cameo in Aristophanes’ “Peace,” a comic fantasy about ending the Peloponnesian War. When a furious arms dealer cannot figure out what to do with a surplus war trumpet, Trygaeus, the central character, suggests pouring lead in the bell to make a steelyard.

Link via BoingBoing, Worth1000 is having a phtoshopping context for Clockwork Art. The basic idea is to infuse Clockwork in everyday and non so every day situations. Here is the link.

I spotted this on BoingBoing some time ago but did not get a chance to post it until now. This is a motorcycle sculpture made from watces made by the Brazilian artist Jose Geraldo Pfau Kings. Here is a whole selection of his works at this site. Speaking of Clockpunk Motorcycles, bicycles were within the realm of possibility many hundreds of years before they were invented in the real world. I wonder what can one say about the motorcycle?

The folks over at Cabinet of Wonders did a post on David C. Roy’s Kinetic Sculptures some time ago. It has been in my drafts list for quite some time now. Here is the description of David Roy’s work from the Cabinet of wonders:

Mr. Roy, who has a degree in physics and engineering, says that the artistic influence of his wife, and later, an interest in optical patterns, led him to the designs he produces today. The names of his sculptures, words such as Radiance, Illusion, Spectrum, and Harmony seem to imply a dual interest in physics and metaphysics, or at least meditation, on Mr. Roy’s part.

Interestingly, I thought these objects were small, either hand-held or head-sized; but if you look at Mr. Roy’s About the Artist page, you will see that they are actually quite large, some of them about the size of large wagon wheels.

It’s nice to see an elegant combination of craftsmanship and mechanical works; and combined, they produce a contemplative and, in some cases, satisfyingly clockpunk result.

Clockpunk indeed! Interestingly the sculptures are designed in Adobe Illustrator. A great combination of the new and the old. The moving parts create quite an interesting effect, the price tag is kind of hefty but one can easily see why. If there will be a clockpunk based mystery novella or a tv series, I am sure we will see something similar to David Roy’s sculptures.

Its been a while since I last posted something, it was an extraordinary busy semester. Hopefully I will be able to post somewhat regularly at least until the new semester starts. I recently found this site about 18th-19th century Automata. Be sure to check out their recordings of music automata, recreations of 18th century music playing automatas. Here is an excerpt which captures the spirit of the age and also the spirit of clockpunk to some extent.

The genuine automatons were born in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment, thanks to the art of watchmaking. This period, which was dominated by scientific spirit, and more precisely, by the biomechanical conception of the human being, corresponds to the birth of numerous artificial creatures, which were intended to be exact replicas or copies of nature. Androids and mechanical animals were thus manufactured by watchmaking technicians who were very interested in medicine and natural sciences. They did not aim at entertaining but rather at contributing to the progress of science. In that view, they surrounded themselves with doctors and surgeons to elaborate the different artificial organs.

Here is the URL: http://www.automates-anciens.com/english_version/

Anyways Happy Holidays, Eid Mubarak, Merry Christmas, Greetings on Kwanza.

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre is a collection of (humorous) contemporary automata. The site has a bunch of interesting things e.g., they also seem to hold competition for building automatas for school kids. Many of their automatas are part of a traveling exhibition in Britain, while others are at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Detroit, USA. Be sure to check out their virtual exhibition section which gives some ideas about their automatas. Coincidently these folks also have a book on making automatas titled Cabaret Mechanical Movement which can be bought from their website. And you can also buy a whole bunch of automatas from the site also.

Keep an eye on the news section of their site for their future exhibitions.

Tangent, an online magazine that reviews short fiction has a review of Hal Duncan’s “The Whenever At The City’s Heart which appears to an awesome story and well placed in the Fantasy side of the Clockpunk genre. Here is the review from Tangent which should give people a good idea about the story.

The first story in the 25th anniversary issue of Interzone, Hal Duncan’s “The Whenever At The City’s Heart,” is a striking mix of “clockpunk” and fantasy, a sense of grand Baroque whimsy coming through in both the telling and the details. The kaleidoscopic structure of the story centers on the great clock tower, the titular “whenever” in the heart of his imagined, nameless city. All glittering glass and brass and mirrored cogs and grinding gears, the tower contains inside it a microcosm that keeps the streets around it following “their paths through time” in an apparently clockwork universe.

As the story begins, however, the watchtower’s bell is inexplicably out of synch, and the world around it grows chaotic, the city “adrift upon its rock, a myriad of singularities spiraling around it.” The narrative switches back and forth between those spiraling singularities, fanciful and surreal, and the tower’s watchman as he struggles desperately to get the universe back in order, but alas, order may be just something “tossed out by chaos as a glib aside.”

Duncan’s imagery is razor-sharp, and his prose playful and poetic, all but making verse out of the vocabulary of today’s physicists. Additionally, while it may initially seem impenetrable, the story holds together better than much of the High Modernist poetry it reminded me of stylistically (and happily, its tone is far removed from their overwrought aristocratic gloom). “Whenever”’s complexity and sensibility will certainly not be to every taste, but even if you’re initially skeptical, you may find it growing on you with rereading, and even if you come away feeling the whole is less than the sum of its parts, there is much to enjoy in its richly imagined fragments: the sandminer listening to a blind boy’s song; the battle-scarred veteran soldier losing himself with a dreamwhore for a little while; the ruling angels and human rebels battling in the streets.

I came across this website not so long ago. They seem to be based in New Zealand and the woodencrafts that they have are not exactly automata since they require a person to move them but they are still pretty cool. If one were writing a Clockpunk story then one could use them as precursors to true automata. Check out their website at the following URL: http://www.allwaze.com/woodcraft-animated.htm