‘…the Renaissance delight in creating deceptive, moving, artificial figures, as if the vanished world of classical antiquity, or Eden itself, could be recreated by a combination of artifice, engineering, and magic — the three being not always distinguishable’ (Sawday, 2007:189).
A data sonification project by Ben Freeth, photo taken in NewBridge Gallery, Newcastle, U.K. 2014
According to Sawday, there are many ways and examples for us to link ‘machine making’ with the alchemy and magic practice in pre-modern science, especially in the Renaissance. For instance, Renaissance automata were seldom seen as benign figures. Rather, they are malignant, even daemonic devices, constructed with the aid of magic and sorcery. Albertus Magnus, the thirteen-century Dominican monk, is said to have complete an automaton which ‘has the power to speak’, with the help of ‘the devil’ (Wood, 2002). Villard de Honnecourt devised a mechanical eagle which was designed to turn its head towards the deacon when he began to read the Gospel (Gille, 1966). In these narratives, the making of machine by pre-modern occult scientists shows their intention of ushering forms into the world that were either uncreated by nature, or which had existed only in myth and legend. The fabrication of machines, engines or mechanisms can thus be considered as methods for the occult scientist for two main intentions: Firstly, to ask questions about Nature, that is, to build a mechanical philosophy to understand the world as a gigantic machine:
“…used the machine not merely as an ontological metaphor, but also, crucially, as a means of intellectual production. The matters of fact that constituted the foundations of the new science were brought into being by a purpose-built scientific machine” (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985: 26).
And secondly, another intention of fabricating machine or mechanism, is to develop or raise human soul, which is based on a belief that human can restore their power by searching the language of Adam (by studying magical mathematics, elements in nature and mechanical universe) which they used to speak with God in the Garden of Eden. This language is believed to be capable of rearranging the forces of nature, and even blur the boundaries between life and death. The search of heavenly motion or perpetual motion in astronomical machines, which thought by scholars, is the pre-modern men’s pursuit of ‘higher spirituality’ by imitating the creative powers of God:
“Humanity may have fallen from its original state of innocence, but the loss could be made good, not just by religion and faith, but by science and technology” (Sawday, 2007).
“In the Renaissance, however, while ‘invention’ might indeed suggest originality, it also expressed a sense of rediscovering what had been hidden by God from humankind after the Fall” (Popplow, 1998).
In this sense, the boundaries between a machine fabricator and an alchemist are thought to be vague in pre-modern era. They both somehow aim to merge the natural and the artificial and to discover the rule behind Nature created by God. From the perspective of an art practitioner, could this notion of machine fabricator as alchemist be adopted in contemporary art practices? Or, could we further ask, how could pre-modern alchemists’ dual intentions (of not only fabricating nature/producing knowledge but also developing human souls) be adopted by the contemporary artists to reflect on the modern phenomena of ubiquitous machines?
These questions, can be experimented through practice by the making of:
Machines for human spiritual/soul revelation
Machine that aims to produce spiritual qualities/experience
Machines about the topic of a unified world, or human temporality