The Mechanical Turk (or The Dwarf in the Machine)

KVM

A Conference-Performance of the Korean Vitra Museum by Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel at Raven Row Gallery, Londonon 5 september 2012

In the male chauvinistic analysis of the primal ornament proposed by Adolf Loos,

a horizontal line represents a woman lying down.

A vertical line, the man penetrating her.

The origins of the first ornament which then appeared,

the cross,were as erotic as they were theological.

If we now multiply the cross by itself, with...

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine horizontal lines,

and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine vertical lines, one arrives at another matrix, closer this time to modern ‘theology’:

the grid.

This matrix, composed of nine horizontal and nine vertical lines crossing each other perpendicularly, outlines sixty-four identical squares.

In Korean, Pan means ‘matrix’ or the site where a debate, battle, competition or spectacle takes place. It is a flat and large field where people gather to witness, together, all kinds of ‘matches’.

Koreans refer to chequer board as ‘the matrix of chess’, Chespan.

On this territory comprising sixty-four squares (thirty-two black and thirty-two white), a battle between two brains takes place. A piece can only occupy a single square; more than one per square is outlawed.

The ‘Mechanical Turk’ is a famous hoax invented by Baron Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. It was popularised in Europe and America by the inventor of the metronome, Johanne Nepomuk Maelzel, to which Edgar Allan Poe makes a paradoxical salute in his 1836 text ‘Maelzel’s Chess Player’.

In this short story, Poe analyses and demonstrates that the technology available at the time was not advanced enough to produce an automaton capable of playing chess without human intervention. He thus surmises that a small person – someone we will refer to from now on as ‘the dwarf in the machine – must necessarily be imbedded in the playing table.

From a few historical etchings of the Mechanical Turk, we have reconstituted the plans of the chess-playing automaton.

It is a piece of wooden furniture in the shape of a safe whose rough dimensions are one hundred ten centimetres long, sixty centimetres wide and seventy-five centimetres high. There are three doors at the front (a, b, c), two drawers (d, e) at the bottom, and, of course, a board on top (f).

The three doors were opened one after the other during the public presentation of the Mechanical Turk. Concealed behind a partition artificially adorned with wheels and cogs, the dwarf in the machine, seated on a removable chair on wheels, moved alternatively in a,

in b,

and in c.

In this veritable box of sensory deprivation, and in order to create the illusion of life, a mechanism allowed the diminutive operator to activate the arm of the Mechanical Turk as well as a magnetic system to move the pieces on (or in fact under) the board.

Cinema offers a proliferation of rows of office ‘black boxes’, in such films as Jacques Tati’s Playtime from 1967.

In the first thesis of Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, the author sees in the dwarf in the machine the allegory of ‘historical materialism’.

Indeed, like the proletarian’s labour power– at once contained and concealed in the commodity – the dwarf in the machine is entirely out of the spectators’ sight.

The dwarf is literally a ‘sub-altern’ – etymologically an ‘other under’ – deprived of the dignity of a subject, let alone that of a political subject.

The dwarf is a sub-proletarian, ‘voice-less‘ and ‘body-less’, a ‘no-body’ who secretly officiates within the ‘black box’, here endowed with a doubly artificial intelligence.

What holds true for industrial rule holds for the post-industrial ‘precariat’, for third sector workers.

Or Tron by Steven Lisberger, produced in 1982 by Disney.

Miniaturised work spaces, which, to return to our tri-partite diagram of the dwarf in the machine, would graphically look like this.

This horizontal proliferation of the work cell required the vertical breaking down into cells of the ‘Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’…

as the architect Louis Sullivan wrote, in 1896, in the article in which he popularised the famous adage: ‘form follows function’.

In this suite of offices, the dwarf’s successive positions are as follows.

Manufacturing in the industrial world, or the office block in the postindustrial one, as productive machines generating surplus value, could only have come into being thanks to the creation of genuine reproductive ‘machines for living’ or, as we say in French for the public housing,HLM.

‘L’habitat à loyer modéré’, the ‘low-cost housing’, that Jean-Luc Godard liked to call ‘l’hôpital de la longue maladie’, the ‘lost cause hospital’.

In Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse – the must of low-cost housing, built in 1952 – the main innovation is a slightly modified spatial distribution on two levels — what is known as a ‘duplex’.

Here is the dwarf’s migration in the ‘machine for living’ in a, b and c.

As one can observe in this storied diagram of the Le Corbusier’s Modulor…

or in this schematic rendering, that of the ‘dom-ino’ – a conflation of the Latin word for house, domus, and the word ‘innovation’ – also by Le Corbusier and dated 1914.

As in the game of dominos, the architectural skill consists, therefore,

in fitting them into one another...

mechanically...

and...

In the tall office building (on the left), as in the collective dwelling (to the right), the disciplinisation of bodies, as Michel Foucault terms it, goes through the introjection of constraints, in this case through a form of spatial (social and political) reductionism.

E.T.A. Hoffmann, who wrote on the Mechanical Turk in a short story from 1814 entitled ‘Automata’, is the undisputed master of ‘The Uncanny’ (das Unheimliche), which, according to Sigmund Freud, is the specific anxiety affecting the ‘strangely disturbing’ home, the Heim in German.

analogically.

In 1957, Jack Arnold staged (chauvinistically) this ‘disturbing strangeness’ in the film The Incredible Shrinking Man.

In the aftermath of World War Two, that of the emergence of ‘suburbs’ (or suburbanisations), cars, individual houses and domestic design, we witness the accidental shrinking of the male protagonist, who finds himself totally at odds, first with the elements of furniture;

...second, with his bride, even.

Arnold thematises here the feeling of ‘familiar strangeness’, by producing a psychedelic image – etymologically speaking, ‘soul revealing’ – of the house within a house.

Trapped in this ‘doll house’, reduced to the size of a mouse, then of a spider, ‘the shrinking man’ is forced to wage war against the household cat, which has become most ‘unfamiliar’ indeed.

In the professional world this time, one finds a similar introduction of spatial (or ‘geo-political’) constraints – what one could call, after Foucault, ‘nano-technologies of the self’ – in the aforementioned film Tron.

The company, the corporation as ‘box’, transformed in the meantime by Robert Wiener, inventor of cybernetics, into a computational ‘black box’, gives way in the film to an internal exploration of these mechanisms by cyborg protagonists reduced to the size of printed circuits.

In this new order of the production of wealth – post-Fordism – it is no longer the blank areas of the map, the squares of the grid, that are privileged, but the horizontal and vertical lines that now constitute the X and Y axes of a tightly knit computational network – what one calls, rather pompously, ‘information highways’.

What one is forced to admit, then, is that, at the absolute speed of information transfer, immobilisation is complete (what Paul Virilio refers to as ‘polar inertia’).

In this sense, NICT (new information and communication technologies) help us ‘sugar the pill’, and facilitate the introjection of spatial constraints by creating the illusion of movement – totally virtual in fact – via networks.

Under the guise of hypermodernity, Amazon has actually created an application called The Mechanical Turk, which operates like a globalised part-time employment agency, in order to draw on the ‘artificial intelligence’ of thousands of highly qualified employees – all this, the website adds, ‘at low cost and on demand’.

This method of ‘rounding out the edges’ (to collect rather tidy sums) via information technologies is perfectly illustrated in Jonathan Ive’s design of the iPhone.

The modernist square gives way to the edge-less rectangular shape, one of the paradigms of twenty-first century industrial design.

What one sees, when one multiplies the iPhone by itself, is that an interstitial area appears precisely where no room was left vacant by modernist orthogonality.

We are interested in this residual space, in red on the screen, which was non-existent in the modernist diagram.

To better understand this zone made visible by postmodern design – that is, through the curved ‘look and feel’, supposedly more user friendly, proposed by the competitive and competing designs of Apple and Nintendo – we are now going to zoom into this miniaturised ‘red district’.

This square, overturned and rectified by an external pressure that embossed its edges, manifests a priori a certain sensuality. With a little imagination, one can easily visualise the forces at work – the soft power of third-generation capitalism – that provoked such an embossing.

At the same time, from a practical point of view, it proves to be potentially dangerous to use, since its angles prick more violently and dig more deeply into the flesh.

The shuriken is an oriental combat weapon with a diamond-shaped and inward-curving edges. It is generally made from leftovers, cast-offs and discarded plates of steel.

Contrary to what one may think, the shuriken is not powerful enough to kill an adversary. But it is effective in indirect combat and serves to frighten, inhibit, possibly even distract the enemy.

A first blow, to create an aesthetic shock or a scientific scandal.

A second blow makes a lasting impression on the minds on theaters of warfare.

As of the third blow, one begins to speak of ‘series’.

Seriality acts as a fidelity card guaranteeing longevity and permanence – both from an economic and historiographic point of view.

This is not only a question of industrial design but indeed of ‘argumentative design’, of critical theory.

With the KVM (Korean Vitra Museum), we would like our works to function as many as star-shaped projectiles that shed light on overlooked areas, minor zones, in order to invent counter-forms, ‘counter archives’.

The KVM is a project by Ludovic Burel and Ju Hyun Lee.