Media Archaeology, Cultures of Automata, and Mechanized ......0 SLIDE 1 Media Archaeology, Cultures of Automata, and Mechanized Cognition My research overall investigates cultures

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SLIDE 1

Media Archaeology, Cultures of Automata, and Mechanized Cognition

My research overall investigates cultures of automata that surround the idea of

mechanized cognition. Specifically, I focus on how Orientalist simulations of the

machinic subject in Western techno-cultures mediated anxieties about early

experimentations with intelligent machines.

By tracing examples ranging from pre-modern humanoid automata to

contemporary socio-technical systems, my approach unites theory and methods

from a) Media Studies, focusing on the archaeology of technical media and de-

colonial critique, b) Cognitive Studies, concentrating on cultural techniques of

cognitive labor, and c) Science and Technology Studies, exploring the interface

between subjectivity and socio-technical systems. I primarily use media archaeology

as a method to investigate the contact point between the cultural and the

technical. In my exploration of contexts of automation as cultural historical

themes, I integrate de-colonial critique as a way to counter the Western-centrism

of Artificial Intelligence history.

SLIDE 2

I have also been active in bringing my research in contact with a practice-based

methodology and creative work.

Recently, in collaboration with ZKM in 2015, I helped reconstruct one of the

automata designed by the 13 century polymath Al-jazari, for an exhibit named

Allah’s Automata, an exhibition of devices from an historical period of ‘Arab

Islamic Renaissance.’ My essay, entitled Divine Clockwork: Reading al-Jazari in the

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Light of al-Ghazali’s Mechanistic Universe Argument, was also published in the art

book called Allah’s Automata as part of the ZKM exhibition.

My interactive media reconstructions of medieval automata have been exhibited as

part of the permanent collection in the Istanbul Museum of The History of Science

and Technology in Islam, since 2008. I also contributed to the exhibit called “Arabs

in the West” with my interactive reconstructions, at the Allard Pierson Museum in

Amsterdam in 2016, as part of the project Encounters with the Orient in Early

Modern European Scholarship.

SLIDE 3

I have also furthered the scope of media archaeological studies by expanding its

focus to be more specific, even in more political contexts, as ways to investigate

alternative futures or pasts, by using speculative design that offers a critical, as well

as a creative way of tackling issues in local situations. For example, one of the

recent collaborations I was involved in with Jussi Parikka, as part of the Istanbul

Design Biennale, engages media archaeology with speculative design as a

pedagogical methodology referring to the experiences of Middle-Eastern

Automata.

I can talk more about this project later, as part of my future research itinerary if

there is an interest from the audience.

The exhibit component of this collaboration, called A Media Archaeology of

Ingenious Designs, looked at the automata and astrolabes developed within the

Arabic-Islamic culture of the 9th to 13th centuries as early precedents of today’s

programmable machines. Automata, mechanical devices that perform a set of

predetermined functions, raise questions about what the human is or isn’t. This

exhibit was centered around two reconstructions of automata, the Elephant

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Clock and a Water Serving Automaton, from the 13th century engineer Ismail Al-

Jazarī’s manuscript called the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices.

My current book project called Epistemic Engines: Archaeology of ‘Oriental’

Automata is contracted at Amsterdam University Press, in the Recursions series. It is

a media archaeology of automata that considers early modern instances of

intelligent automata as conceptual prototypes of the Artificial Intelligence project.

I argue that, as mediums of mechanized cognition, these automata inhabit a

three-way interface between the European self, the Oriental other and the

machine, as the Orientalist forms of “othering” have been instrumental in the

imaginary media of the mechanization of human cognition.

SLIDE 4

Today, as a way to demonstrate one of those instances, I am going to present The

Chess Player, a chapter from my book in progress.

I will be speaking about how an 18th century chess player automaton creates an

opportunity from which to engage with discussions about mechanized cognition in

the context of automata culture during the Enlightenment.

I will use Chess Player Automaton to demonstrate how, throughout the

development of the project of imagining mechanized cognition during the

Enlightenment, some of the underlying cultural assumptions were embodied by

various human machine assemblages, were experimented with by these

prototypes, and were culturally programmed into their material performance. I will

also show how some of our current notions of Artificial Intelligence are

conditioned by similar cultural assumptions that guided early modern

experimentations with mechanized cognition.

In my analysis of the Chess Playing Automaton I explore the following questions:

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How does the Chess Playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental

subject to illustrate the notion of mechanized cognition?

In what ways do these uses connect to Orientalist framing of a Muslim as

machine-like subject as rooted in medieval Christian theology and literature?

I argue that these experimental products of the perennial myth of machine

intelligence have mediated the Enlightenment project of a self-regulating subject.

They have simultaneously acted as performers of technological and cultural

alterity, satiating the anxieties caused by the unfamiliar notion of mechanized

cognition, by projecting them onto all-familiar ethnic and religious differences.

SLIDE 5

Just to give you an overall context of how this chapter is related to the rest of the

book, let me briefly tell you about the most recent reincarnation of the Chess

Player, called The Mechanical Turk. This project was also my initial entry point into

this research.

At the beginning of the 21st century, an AI project reimagined the extended

cognitive network in the form of a virtual labor market. Inspired by the 18th

century chess player automaton, Amazon.com branded this crowdsourcing

platform as the Mechanical Turk. Amazon.com’s initial motivation to build the

Amazon Mechanical Turk, or AMT, emerged after the failure of its artificial

intelligence programs in the task of finding duplicate product pages on its retail

website. After a series of futile attempts, the project engineers turned to humans

to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system. Later, AMT

made this cognitive labor platform available to private contractors in return for a

commission. AMT’s digital workshop emulates artificial intelligence systems by

replacing digital computing with globally sourced human brainpower.

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The virtual migrant workers of the system, power the so-called “artificial-artificial

intelligence” engine of the Western software industry in a state of exception,

devoid of legal rights. If the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor,

then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. This configuration also embodies

some of the conflicts whose seeds are placed during the early modern

conceptualizations of the mechanization of industrial labor through division of

cognitive labor. One of the most significant examples of this conceptualization was

the chess-playing automaton that performed the insurmountable conflicts of the

disciplining of the human mind for industrial production.

SLIDE 5

Figure.1.1 In this engraving Joseph Racknitz showed how he thought the

automaton operated.

Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton was constructed and presented

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in 1770 at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and gave the

impression that the pipe-smoking Turk mannequin, controlled by a sophisticated

mechanism under the cabinet, could play serious chess against human opponents

However, the seemingly mechanical mind of the Turk was actually manipulated by

Kempelen’s chess master assistant, who was hidden beneath the pseudo-

mechanism. The Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and

the Americas and attracted many notable challengers and spectators, such as

Charles Babbage, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Similar to its 21st century reincarnation, the 18th century Chess Player Automaton

promised to deliver a truly mechanized intelligence, but it neither succeeded nor

entirely failed in that mission. It was not exactly an automaton because the hands

of the Oriental android were indeed controlled by a hidden human operator; but it

still served its main function by providing a platform for an evaluation of the main

question; “what would a mechanized cognition mean?”

The Chess Playing Automaton performed this question as a material discursive

apparatus in which a HUMAN PASSED AS A MACHINE THAT WAS PASSING AS A

HUMAN.

My interest as a media scholar in intelligent automata has two motivations. I

consider most Enlightenment automata as examples of imaginary media because

they were either a) designed much too early, and have been materialized at some

point in time, or b) they were mere conceptual prototypes of a much more

sophisticated future technical media. Even though they were never materialized

into finished products, they still functioned as experiments that influence the final

product.

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Intelligent automata are also good to think with because they are apparatuses that

inherently activate the question of the nature of the "real" operator as part of

their epistemic function. Possible answers to this recurrent puzzle often provide

explanations with further moral consequences, depending on the nature of the

operator that is implicated. In that sense, intelligent automata are epistemic

engines through which subjectification and desubjectification processes are

modeled.

However, in most histories of automata, either the focus is solely put on the

technical dimension while ignoring the cultural, OR, considered solely in relation to

the European cultural context while overlooking examples from Islamicate cultures

as an extension of colonialist desires to exclude non-western cultures from the

Western-centric histories of science and technology.

As a scholar with a Middle Eastern background my stake in this research is

acknowledging the need to decolonize the repertoire of media history by de-

linking these previously isolated two cultures of media. This is because I believe

that broadening the media archaeological horizon must address more than the

inclusion of the “Others” of media history while leaving intact the more

infrastructured forms of ‘control of knowledge.’ Deep time histories of Middle East

art and technology have to be mobilized as ways to participate in the debate

about modernity as the historiographical condition of power that gradually

cultivated as part of the Orientalist narratives.

So, how did the Chess playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental subject to

illustrate the notion of mechanized intelligence?

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While working on his initial conceptions of the Chess Playing Automaton,

Wolfgang von Kempelen, a technocrat for the Austrian Habsburg Empire, was also

witnessing the state apparatus in which he was embedded, going through wide-

ranging bureaucratic reforms based on the calculability of standardized social

relations. The Chess Player embodied a similar set of questions and became a

conceptual prototype for mechanized reason.

SLIDE 7

In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault considers 18th century

automata as models for how the human body was thought to reflect the social

order. Consequently, the mechanistic conception of the human body needs to be

read in two registers; the anatomico-metaphysical register as constituted mainly

through Cartesian mind/body duality; and, the technico-political register that

reflected empirical methods deployed by the state to discipline the operations of

the body through state institutions. In the context of these two registers, the 18th

century humanoid automata functions as a model, on one hand for submission, on

the other for empirical analysis.

Foucault has often been criticized for ignoring the racial others in his

historiography. Notably, his concept of docility displaces Orientalist traces by solely

focusing on the European subject in a selective genealogy. This absence becomes

more critical in the analysis of an automaton that carries significations of Oriental

“other,” such as Kempelen’s chess-playing automaton.

SLIDE 8

However, I believe that the trick of the chess-playing automaton involves more

than just exchanging the enacted body of the European chess player with the

represented body of the Turk, animated through its mechanical artifice. It also

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includes initial assumptions that were set up in the audience by the automaton’s

chess performance that were crucial in influencing the public debates on the

mechanized cognition that provided the larger context for these performances.

These initial assumptions are closely tied to Orientalist undercurrents that were

exploited by Enlightenment discourse in order to configure the docile subject on

the image of the Turk.

The Orientalist assumptions that were active in Enlightenment automata were also

effective in the cultural performance of Kempelen’s automaton. I will focus on the

two main aspects of the affordance of the image of the Turk as a significant part

of the main interface of the chess-playing automaton.8 The first critical aspect of

the Turk’s performance is its liminal quality. This liminality created a buffer zone

against the risk associated with the idea of the man-machine that most

Enlightenment humanoid automata performed. That potential risk was often

associated with instigations of libertinism, atheism, and insurrection in public due

to the heretical understanding of a body without a soul. Relegating this precarious

role to an Oriental figure had, in fact, a long tradition with origins in medieval

romance literature. The Oriental automata, through its association with liminal

spaces and experiences in these literary accounts, conveyed surveillance, discipline,

and enforcement of limits of morality.

The second aspect of the Turk’s performance is a particular form of docility that

conveys the idea of the disciplined productive body, which played a salient role in

the formation of the enlightened culture). The association of the Oriental with

docility has its roots in medieval theology, where the Muslim subjects were

considered as strict followers of religious code. Linking this association with the

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discourse of Oriental automata, Christian theology configured a particular

discourse of Muslim as automaton. Furthermore, docility prefigures the hidden

chess player’s performance of the intellectual labor on behalf of the Oriental

automaton. This dual performance of docility highlights the question of the

intellectual labor in the context of the epistemic renovation in 18th-century

Europe. These two aspects of the Turk’s performance—docility and liminality—are

crucial for grasping its function as a model of power for the idealization of a social

order in the context of the large-scale processes of mechanization of labor in

Europe in the 18th century.

An important aspect of this mechanization is the division of mental labor,

which entails a re-configuration of intellectual production in a multitude of

domains, ranging from literary authorship to bureaucratic organizations.

1. Docile Automata

In Europe in the second half of the 18th century, automata performed as a

secure experimental apparatus for exploring impenetrable ontological

liminalities in a more systemic way and most of the time simulated life in order

to redefine it . Fueled by the mechanistic philosophy, humanoid automata

trans- formed not only the cultural attitude toward living creatures but also

machines, as they performed the idea that mechanisms were also living beings.

The mutual relationship between the animation of machinery and the

mechanization of life was explored through the experimental apparatus of

humanoid and animal automata and was popularized through the debates

instigated by their public exhibition in Europe.

Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton formulated the question of the

mechanized life with a unique emphasis: Can the mind exist without the body?

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To this question, it gave two answers simultaneously: yes and not yet. The

actual answer was not yet, as the automaton was indeed controlled by a human

operator. However, the deceptive yes response was still valuable as a

philosophical game10 for grappling with the ideas that were later made

technically possible and implemented systematically, such as self-regulating

mechanisms.

SLIDE 9

In contrast to other automata of the 18th century, the Turk’s apparatus did not

act as mere clockwork; instead, it gave the impression of a self-regulating

system that could counter external actions within the symbolic logic of chess. As

historian of technology Otto Mayr (1970) suggests, in contrast to the idea of

clockwork universe, which was the political universe of autocratic feudalism, the

mechanical, political, and economic ideas of self-regulating systems influenced

the Enlightenment ideas of liberal subjects and democracy. This association is

partly constructed as a result of the rationalization of the socioeconomic life

through industrialization, where subjects self-regulate according to their

rational economic interests.

Consequently, an automatized chessboard represents the ideal Enlightenment

universe, where the subjects and their possible actions are coded according to the

regulations informed by the power structure of the society. Each subject is

endowed with a relative power, and they cannot go beyond the roles for which

they qualify. Particularly, when these intrinsic properties are abstracted into

geometric functions and when combined with the functions of other subjects, they

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have the potential to exhibit numerous but finite possibilities for a final outcome.

This is another reason for mechanized chess being a model for imagining a society

whose coded subjects articulate a plurality of results. Thus, the chess-playing Turk

embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanical

docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe of the

game of chess.

The chess-playing automaton performed its role as a model of power in

multiple layers, the most significant of which was the demonstration of knowledge

as a tool of power. This demonstration followed a particular tradition, namely, the

nature as a divine theater as suggested by naturalist philosophy.

The hidden chess-player was the open secret of Kempelen’s shows.

Kempelen admitted that his automaton was just a so-called “happy deception.” As

Simon Schaffer notes, one of the roles of these automata was, quote, “to allow the

selective entry by th[e] power to the inner workings of art and nature”, unquote.

In other words this open secret was also a conceited wink by the guardians of

knowledge and power, reminding the general public of the guardians’ privileged

status.

Kempelen studied the works on human physiology of prominent naturalists

of his time. He also followed the tradition of public spectacle of experimental

natural philosophy in his demonstration of the automata. His shows were

meticulously designed to set up multiple assumptions in the audience about the

inner workings of the automaton in order to initiate a collective investigation.

The element of mystery in Kempelen’s performance, functions within the system of

representation of the natural philosophy, which perceived the whole of nature as a

“divine” theater. This system of representation could be easily exploited in order to

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create a particular moral impression on its audience. Scottish philosopher Thomas

Reid expounds this moral effect as follows: Q “Upon the theatre of nature we see

innumerable effects, which requires an agent endowed with active power; but the

agent is behind the scene.” UQ

Kempelen’s Oriental automaton benefited from the assumptions within this

theater as a significant representation of the techno-mythical idea of the

mechanized mind. It was not just a machine; it also provided the language that

made it possible to articulate that myth. As in every technical medium, it carried its

own inscriptions of discursive formulations that defined its cultural system of

significations. The Automaton Chess Player performed these inscribed notions

through fundamental puzzles that have been relevant throughout the history of

the artificial intelligence discourse, and which were tackled by notable scholars

that began in the 17th century with Gottfried Leibniz and continued into the 19th

and 20th century with Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Babbage, Norbert Wiener, and Alan

Turing.

What is missing in these accounts is that the chess-playing automaton was

only able to perform its role through the peculiar coupling of the techno-mythical

idea of automated mind, with the body of Europe’s “Other,” which harbored the

so-called “heretical” attempts of materialist ideas under the turban of The Turk.

SLIDE 10

Since the introduction of Byzantine and Muslim automata during the

medieval period, and, up until early modernity, the European conception of the

Oriental automata functioned as a composite alterity by combining the unknown

world of automata with the unknown world of the Oriental. Medieval Christian

theology utilized this association for a symbolic disproof of Islam by assigning its

subjects to the so-called “mindless” mechanical world of gears. In medieval France,

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for example, monks used the term mechanicum in order to describe Muslim

practices of sorcery. The Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, contrasted the

Muslim mechanicum, with the transformation of the Eucharist which was one of

the inimitable signs of perpetual miraculous semiosis. This contrast was the basis of

his rendering of Islam as bereft of miracle making.

SLIDE 11

The humanoid automata were also referred to as “mammets” whose

etymology is traced to Muhammed. The term was later used as a humorous

expression to rebuke young women in English Renaissance drama as having

marionette-like behavior.1 Kathleen Biddick, in her insightful work, considers this

association as an integral part of a, quote, “theological foreclosure of semiosis”,

unquote, to Muslims. The subjects of Islam, devoid of the magic of meaning-

making, could only be the initial contents of the Christian politico-theological

apparatus that has the privilege of creating the final, ideal, miraculous meaning in

the embodiment of a European sovereign.

According to Lewis Mumford, by the 17th century, “[m]echanics became the

new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah: the machine.” However,

that messiah first had to engage in a relentless endeavor in purging the Muslim

automaton from itself in order to embark on its long journey towards a full

1 Such as in the words of Lord Capulet, the father of Juliet, after she opposes marrying with Count Paris

against her father’s wish:

And then to have a wretched puling fool,

A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender,

To answer 'I'll not wed; I cannot love,

I am too young; I pray you, pardon me.–Romeo and Juliet Act 3 scene 5, lines 184-188, in Shakespeare,

William. Romeo and Juliet. Classic Books Company, 2001

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machinic subject. In fact, this process was part of a long-term systematic epistemic

violence.

SLIDE 12

Edward Said, a scholar of literary critique, has explored one of the most

elaborate intellectual projects in Western history of epistemic violence. Said

describes Orientalism as, quote, “a style of thought based upon an epistemological

distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.”, unquote. Orientalism is

an ideological product of the European material culture, constructing the Orient as

a mode of discourse. Especially after the end of the eighteenth century this

discourse became a “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having

authority over the Orient” by primarily functioning as a geopolitical awareness as

well as allocating this awareness into a “whole series of interests” including

aesthetic, academic, economic and sociological domains. Said explains that one of

the crucial means of this domination was to render the Oriental subject impossible

to be “a free subject of thought or action.”

Orientalism historically coincides with the European colonial expansion

period that takes place between 1815 and 1914. Similarly, Foucault locates the

epistemic violence through the re-definition of sanity within the emerging

institutions of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning

of the nineteenth century. From this crucial overlap, post-colonial scholar Gayatri

Spivak has deduced the existence of a “two-handed engine,” the epistemic

renovation that redefines historical narrative both in Europe and in colonies.

SLIDE 13

Therefore, Oriental automata represent a crucial link in this two-handed

engine: On one hand the automaton performs the docility for the Western subject

in the image of the Oriental. On the other, it casts the Oriental subject outside of

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the norms of being human by subjecting them to the world of the machines.

However, these techno-political assumptions that were active in the Oriental

automata’s performance also carried a transformative power through their act of

simulation.

Performing the idea of the self-regulating system through the symbolic

universe of the chess game was partly enabled by the cultural alterity enacted by

the image of the Turk. Until the 19th century, in Europe, the term “Turk” was used

interchangeably with “Muslim,” referring to the subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

On the other hand, in the European imagination, chess, as the proto-war simulator,

was introduced and mastered by the Orientals and epitomized their military

power. Therefore, the simulation of the simulator in the example of the chess-

playing automaton had a double significance in the articulation of the ideas of the

self-regulating system and autonomous mind. First, the material manifestation of

a mechanized cognition by means of self-regulating machinery brings the mind

down to the same universe as the body that is the so-called “profane” nature of

the physical world. Consequently, this materiality rendered the mind

manipulatable towards the imperialist wishes of the sovereign. Within the history

of imperialist projects designed to subdue nature, this moment signifies a crucial

recognition that nature is now nothing but a series of clockworks that has also

subsumed human mind within its mechanics.

However, the simulation of the mechanized cognition via the performance

of the Oriental alterity was also related to the unsettling evocations of the

autonomous mind for the 18th century European subject. The most crucial change

that caused these uncanny evocations was the middle class, emerging in major

urban centers, as a result of industrialization. This emerging middle class was

differentiated from the masses of manual labor by means of their involvement in

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the prolific print culture. This differentiation was further highlighted with the

moral authority ascribed to the recognition of a so-called higher-order, refined

intellect as distinct from that of the lower-order, mechanical intellect.

SLIDE 14

In this milieu, the idea of the mechanization of cognition created a crisis in

this distinction and undermined the moral authority associated with the

intellectual labor. The immense industrial expansion of the print culture in the late

seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, was also meant as a

deterioration of the traditional authority associated with the literary “authorship.”

Indeed, the mechanized writing styles performed by the highly professionalized

authors of these texts mirrored the mechanized production of textual material.

This fact was clearly visible in the production of the pamphlets that depict

demonstrations of android automata that perform mechanized writing, such as

The Writer built by Jacques Droz.

These mass-produced texts were mostly reproduced from one prototype and

reflected an intellectual indifference to the topic at hand by their professionalized

authors. Their textual craftsmanship on the mechanized writing of The Writer

automaton resembled the subject of their works.

The decline of the moral authority of literary authorship as a result of the

mechanization of intellectual labor is also related to the docility correlated with

work that was previously associated with the machinic subject of manual labor. The

degree of the perceived docility of an intellectual worker was directly correlated

with that worker’s position in the intellectual hierarchy. The chess-playing Turk, for

example, was useful to perform this intellectual hierarchical order because it

included various levels of expertise distributed across its participant operators.

During Kempelen’s performance, the intelligent automaton was subjected to the

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mastery of its impresario, the state engineer who belonged to the class of

managerial analysts, who stood clearly above others in the cognitive hierarchy. As

Simon Schaffer explains, this was the era when “the science of calculation became

the supreme legislative discipline, just as the calculating engines provided both

legislative and executive coordination.” Kempelen, as a leading figure of the

bureaucratic revolution of the Habsburg State, clearly embodied this supreme

legislative role.

SLIDE 15

But still, this was not the highest position in the intellectual hierarchy. As a

managerial engineer of bureaucratic processes, Kempelen had to rely on

mathematicians for laying out the principles for solving some of these puzzles. One

of the most significant examples of the Turk’s performance that used varied levels

of intellectual participation was called the Knight’s Tour. That problem is based on

the premise that a knight would visit all the squares (black and white) of the

board, starting from any square on the board, and completing its move by landing

on each square only once. The Knight’s Tour was inherently a mathematical puzzle

that was solved by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1758 when chess started

to be in fashion in European courts. Euler’s problem was an example of a

Hamiltonian path problem. Today, it is widely known in graph theory as a special

case of a traveling salesman problem that appears in a multitude of contemporary

computer science applications, ranging from semantic networks to genetic

algorithms. The demonstration of this puzzle highlights the role of another actor

in Kempelen’s chess playing automaton, the mathematician who represents a

higher cognitive status whose contribution was considered as a quintessential

rational skill. The distribution of roles in the Turk’s performances involved a clear

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division of mental labor, which would later become a significant subject matter in

the development of mechanical calculators.

SLIDE 16

These models made visible the impending techno-political reconfigurations,

and secured docility for the intellectual labor within self-regulating social order. In

other words, the development of technical means for intelligent automata was an

imbricated element of the public contestation for its political ends. The division of

mental labor was one of the most crucial aspects of the techno-political register,

due to its direct effect on the developments of the technologies of rationalism.

While the Turk was demonstrating the potential of the idea of an intelligent

automaton during its tours across Europe, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations

expounded an economic theory for the impending Industrial Revolution by

attributing a significant role to the division of labor. Smith observed that the

division of labor not only enables higher levels of automation but also eventually

renders human labor obsolete at an increasing rate.

Following Adam Smith’s analysis in The Wealth of Nations, a British

mathematician Charles Babbage thought that the principle of division labor when

applied to mental labor would serve for his eventual goal of transferring the

functions of the human cognitive functions to the operations of a machine.

Before this project, Babbage had seen one of the performances of the chess-

playing Turk in London in 1819, and about a year after he went to see the

automaton again at St. James Street and challenged it to a game. Babbage lost the

game in an hour. He later considered the thought of building a chess-playing

machine and exhibiting it for a stable income source, in order to fund his other

ambitious projects, such as the Difference Engine, but he never realized this idea.

SLIDE 17

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In 1825, a new owner, Johann Nopemuk Maelzel, the Viennese engineer,

inventor, and impresario of automata, brought the chess-playing Turk to several

Northern and Southern American cities. Not long after, however, a major challenge

to the chess-playing automaton’s coveted secret of modus operandi took place.

Based on a thorough comparison between Babbage’s calculating machine and The

Turk’s performance, the young editor of a Virginia based periodical, named Edgar

Alan Poe argued that the chess-playing automaton could not operate without the

manipulation of a human agent. In his essay, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” Poe

concluded that, quote, “(t)here is then no analogy whatever between the

operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr.

Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a ‘pure machine’ we must be

prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the

inventions of mankind”, unquote.

Poe’s later analytical literary works embodied a particular kind of

predicament that concerned his intellectual labor. The very possibility of a chess

automaton as a “pure machine” must have posed an uncanny prospect to Poe as

an intellectual worker, for its implications about the value of his intellectual labor.

In one of his later speculative narratives, Poe depicted von Kempelen as an

alchemist who transforms lead into gold, resulting in a reduced value of gold and

an increase in the price of lead in international markets. This could be read as an

allusion to the expected reduction of the intellectual labor as an outcome of the

mechanization of cognition. Poe later reflected this anxiety in a systemic way,

through his tales of ratiocination, a series of detective stories, including the

infamous Purloined Letters, which became a literary genre of its own.

Poe’s rejection of the possibility of a “pure machine” enabled him to

imagine that the solution to this puzzle included a very particular type of human

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machine assemblage, which was also a direct challenge to the idea of an

autonomous subject. Poe’s essay is particularly significant as a reflection on a

prominent theme in the American psyche, especially with the evocation of terror

and anxiety caused by the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in relation to

the mechanization of the mind. This transformation was a function of both

mimesis and the sublime through the formation of a particular relationship

between self and alterity that enabled transcending the conventional limits of the

individualized human subject.

In American Orientalism, the excess and magic produced by the wondrous

objects of these shows also reflected the consumption fantasies of the emerging

American middle class as a result of the colonial expansion of American trade

activities. The chess-playing automaton, as an imaginary media, exploited this

consumer fantasy for its transformative effect based on the anxiety caused by the

emergence of a new form of embodiment and subjectivity.

It is within this Orientalist consumer fantasy world that the figure of the

Turk, by functioning as the mimetic surrogate for the alterity of the machine,

enabled that transformative effect. The Turk essentially transferred the tension of

mechanization of cognition by allowing its enactment to be mediated by a

rationalized and tamed alterity that eventually humanized the uncanny premise of

automated cognition. This mediation is the key to understanding how the self-

regulating liberal subject relieved its anxiety of the mechanization of cognition by

means of the assurance of the cultural difference it had already established

through the fantasies and desires projected onto the Oriental.

SLIDE 18

CONCLUSION

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Archaeologies of technical media, whether they are imagined, planned,

behaviorally prototyped, or commodified, present immense possibilities for an

integrated analysis of technical media, material cultures, and the senses.

Consequently, my study of the chess-playing automaton as an archetypal imaginary

media of the mechanization of cognition focuses not only various instances of its

materialization but also its epistemic formulations and cultural techniques that

produce their own subjects. Throughout this project, I demonstrate that, by

enacting ideas of automated cognition in their most precarious stages, the chess

player embodied in its materialization a perpetual effort to collectively imagine an

alternative way of being human for the Western subject. The interaction between

the technological alterity of the myth of the mechanized cognition and the cultural

alterity of the Oriental has been a critical factor in this effort. The Chess player

mediated this process by perpetually translating one type of difference into

another, from technical to cultural and reverse.

END

SLIDE 19

My research agenda, for the next five years, focuses on two complementary

projects in various stages of development; Postcolonial Archaeology of Affective

Computing and Middle Eastern Futurism. On one side, I look at how western

techno-cultures rely on colonial imaginations for their conceptualizations of media

technologies from Affective Computing to AI. Equivalently, I am also interested in

how Middle Eastern cultures, in conversation with these techno-imaginaries,

engage with alternative futurities as an inherently de-colonial response. My recent

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collaboration on Speculative Design and the Middle Eastern Futurism that was part

of the Istanbul Design Biennial is a product of this dual research focus.

Using speculative design, issues of local cultural politics of Ottoman pasts, of

alternative geographies of past Islamic inventions, of contested territories of

political representation that imagine other futures, meshes into a form of media

archaeology as practice-based methodology in a workshop setting. To mobilize the

middle-eastern media imaginaries as an alternative historical lineage, the project

aimed to use a speculative design method as a collective thinking through doing,

for countering the Western-centric media history narrative.

In our speculative design workshop, we explored these various forms of futurities

with the help of a “what if” question. What if the legacy of science and technology

in the Islamic world would have been able to gather such momentum that the

advanced technological age would have been branded by this alternative

technological heritage? Specifically, in the workshop we wanted to extend the

exhibit experience into a sort of collective imagination exercise by playing with its

objects and using them as our reference points.

Here is an example…