Duchamp: Interface: Turing: A Hypothetical Encounter between the Bachelor Machine and the Universal Machine Dieter Daniels NEW MEDIA ART 2013.09.24 MAAT.

Duchamp: Interface: Turing: A Hypothetical Encounter between the Bachelor

Machine and the Universal Machine

Dieter Daniels

NEW MEDIA ART 2013.09.24 MAAT LAB JongCheon, Shin

Four Key Aspects of Daniels’ Thesis

1. Apply concepts from new technologies to Duchamp’s work

2. Parallels between Duchamp and Turing

3. Duchamp’s works in analogy to current media tech-nologies

4. Common structural grounds between contemporary media practices and designs by Duchamp and Turing

［ p.118: P02 ］Duchamp’s Pocket Chess Game, 1944- The wooden chessboard is replaced by a periparetic(walking) game for bachelor globetrotters.

［ p.118: P03 ］Duchamp’s Pocket Chess with Rubber, 1944-Marcel Duchamp made his Pocket Chess Game into an artwork. But why the glove? We’ve already seen the hand that is placed in Duchamp’s chess draw-ing and painting, Etude pour portrait des Joueurs d’Echecs, 1911. The hand as a physical element intrudes into the mental space of chess. In the same way the dataglove intrudes into the dataspace. In today’s digital technology, the size of the human finger is a physical limitation concerning the interface of the keyboard. This limit to the manual access of immaterial information is what Duchamp seems to investigate in his work.

PART 3. Technological Imagination

3.1 Duchamp’s Pocket Chess with Rubber, 1944

Duchamp’s Pocket Chess with Rubber, 1944

［ p.119: P02 ］ Through physical references like the dataglove, movement within dataspace approaches natural movement. In this way cyberspace becomes a place of physical experience and is given a potentially erotic dimension as you see in cover of the magazine Spiegel.

This opposition between tactility(the haptic) and reading(the text) may be one aspect of the book cover that Duchamp designed for Le Surrealisme en 1947 under the motto “Please touch”.

3.2 Cybersex, cover of the magazine Spiegel, 1993 & Priere de toucher, cover for Le Surrealisme en 1947

Priere de toucher, cover for Le Surrealisme en 1947

［ p.120: P01 ］ The imaginary apparatus of the Large Glass could well correspond in some of its essential elements to the media-technical devices that have been designed around the theme of cybersex in the 1990s.

［ p.121: P02 ］ With Duchamp, fifty years after the Large Glass, the previously imaginary bride goes concrete in Etant donnes. Instead of a technosexual metaphor comprehensible via the Green Box’s operating instructions, we gaze at a perfect illusion whose effect is direct without any textual explanation. The ocular device is two holes in a door or virtual reality glasses.

3.3 Etant donnes: Duchmp’s bride made concrete

Étant donnés [Exterior] (1946-1966)

Étant donnés[Interior] (1946-1966)

Étant donnés[Cross-section](1946-1966)

［ p.122: P01 ］ The relation between verbal imagination and tactility is also what Duchamp deals with in the rubber breasts as book cover under the motto “Please touch”. He said jokingly he was thinking of contriving a mechanical woman whose vagina would be made up of interconected springs and ball bear-ings and be conrtactile. Five years after ending work on the Large Glass, Duchamp announced the incarnation of the imaginary bride.

［ p.49: P01 ］ But the bride in Etant donnes will remain for the viewer just as untouchable as for the bachelors in the Large Glass. The question of whether a technical surrogate for a physical encounter is possible is denied by both Duchamp and Turing.

3.4 The relation between verbal imagination and tactility

PART 4. En Route to the Universal Bachelor Machine

［ p.122: P03 ］ Long before the existence of blueprints for cybersex, Turing’s test as well as Duchamp’s Large Glass point out the consequences of synthesizing telematics and artificial intelligence. This leads to the actual goal: the machine as perfect sexual part-ner. This goal would be reached in merging Turing’s and Duchamp’s model to become the universal bachelor ma-chine. However, this would be no longer a construct stemming from an artistic or mathematical imagination, but would follow from the practice of dealing with media techniques.

［ p.123: P02 ］ This means that media technology turns Turing’s and Duchamp’s models into reality - without having heard of them.

4.1 The actual goal & the universal bachelor machine

4.2 The difference between art(Duchamp) and technology(Turing)

［ p.123: P03 ］ Friedrich Kittler – “power over reality” “Art has historically been a highly efficient method of signaling the presence of omnipotence. But it is today that art under computer condi-tions is replaced by a sorcery that no longer swears to omnipotence but to reality.”

As to the factual situation, the difference art and technology seems to be clear. Duchamp’s machine remains a model (that is, art), while Tur-ing’s machine is in operation (that is, technology).

But is “power over reality” the last word on the impotence of art versus technology?

4.3 The universal bachelor machine (1)

［ p.123: P04 ］ Duchamp’s and Turing’s machine models each stem from a deeply indi-vidual imagination. In both cases the interchangeability between man and machine provides a substitute for a physical and emotional deficit.

［ p.124: P03 ］ Universality- The mental purity of mathematical function is transmitted via the com-puter to the world of things (that is, it becomes a real, technical function). Thus, an actual universal use develops for the apparatus based on it.

Bachelor machine- In today’s universal deployment of computer, as proven by the exam-ples of machine-chess and machine-sex, the same motif become manifest that had occupied Turing when he developed his theory of the universal machine. It is exactly this reason that the universal machine can be aligned with the series of bachelor machines.

The psychic universality of the bachelor machines corresponds to the functional universality of Turing’s machine.

4.4 The universal bachelor machine (2)

［ p.125: P02 ］ The universal machine represent “omnipotence”. Turing seems to consider an absolute man-machine exchangeabil-ity possible and almost inevitable.

In contrast, Duchamp’s Large Glass remains in an imperfect cycle of frustration. Like all bachelor machine it stands for the unattainability of a perfect substitute and thus for the suffering from the phenomenon it describes.

［ p.125: P03 ］ This suffering is exactly what Alan Turing was successful in doing, express-ing his suffering in a mathematical theorem. Because of its “widespread electrification”, this machine has established it-self in today’s society. More and more this universal technology is taking over the role that was once reserved for the arts, creating a surprapersonal expres-sion of suffering, love, and desire.

［ p.126: P03 ］ That is also the theme that Duchamp depicts in the Large Glass.

Conclusion: Expansion of “power of reality”

［ p.127: P02 ］ The contest between the operational capacity of the univer-sal machine and the imaginative capacity of the bachelor ma-chine comes down to the question of who can better imitate whom: whether the machine a man or whether the man a machine.

［ p.127: P02 ］ A steady expansion in the technological “power over reality” results only from a synthesis of the psychic universality of the bache-lor machine in tandem with the mathematic and technical universality of Turing machine.