Machine Love
Here is one human predicament, one of many: we desire that which does not desire--and certainly does not desire us. We seem to want to jump the circuit of human logic, human wish-fulfillment, human design totally, bodies intact or not intact, minds recording or not recording, doesn't matter, because (it seems) what's outside of knowledge must sustain itself via a mechanics that doesn't much depend on bipedal legs and opposable thumbs and neocortical tissue, wonderful as these advances have been to our own manufacture of artifacts.
My own escapism often focuses on machines: I love the big ones, the obsolete ones that once embodied the height and breadth and depth of enigneering. These machines-- the dynamo, the steam engine, the turbine--sustained the infrastructure of human movement while being visibly absent from that system save to the few who had to know the machines thoroughly to keep them working. And the inventors: here were the fellows who straddled the systems' divide, guys easily made heroic and inaccessible by their specific knowledge of what appears to be complexity contained, chaos gauged by meters, controlled by levers and made to output itself, quantized: electricity.
This is decidedly a skewed view, one made possible by a vague understanding of how these machines work communicated mainly through three-page essays with titles like: Michael Faraday: Taming Electricity, and Maxwell's Darling Demon. These essays tend to hero worship, furthering the "Myth of the American Inventor," a phrase from an apropos scene in The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon).
Briefly, the scene: protagonist Oedipa Maas is touring the R&D side of a large aerospace engineering corporation, Yoyodyne. She talks to a young inventor-hack, a guy made cynical and distracted by the routine of his job. She mentions that she didn't think people invented anymore: "I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?" And the engineer explains that what's taken the risk and reward away from invention is the patent system and corporate-owned intellectual property. The myth, "one man per invention," is not borne out by experience. Disillusionment with the present ensues, and so does the aggrandizement of the past that is often coincident with disillusionment. So the myths persist.
Thinking I might investigate the focus of some rather mythical ideas I have about machines, I toured the Georgetown Steam Plant, home of three turbines that once powered Seattle's cable car system and provided electricity for the Georgetown neighborhood, an industrial zone wholly inhospitable to sentiment, what with the emphasis on distribution rather than consumption: lots of barbed wire, loose gravel, nondescript warehouses, and desolate backdoor break areas composed of mismatched, often broken chairs that suggest a contingent comfort, a waiting space for something that already happened.
It was a fine setting for a visit to past circumstances, their focus being industry enabled by new ways to move stuff, lots of it, around. It's fitting that Boeing field edges the steam plant to the south because riding up to the plant, one sees it's planes doing the moving of stuff, not the cable cars the steam plant once powered. With 1906 moulded in poured concrete on the building's neoclassic-revival style facade, the planes are a superfluous counterpoint to the building's outmoded utility.
But then you go inside, and you see the machines themselves, and you start to think that if utility had a distributor, the steam plant could surely still be it. The turbines are big, and the intracacy of their sprawl beautiful. That they're still "fully functional" is all the more tantalizing, given their current quiescence. Around the base of one machine steam or smoke whorled suggestively.
Next: The love affair continues, culminating with: robots.
My own escapism often focuses on machines: I love the big ones, the obsolete ones that once embodied the height and breadth and depth of enigneering. These machines-- the dynamo, the steam engine, the turbine--sustained the infrastructure of human movement while being visibly absent from that system save to the few who had to know the machines thoroughly to keep them working. And the inventors: here were the fellows who straddled the systems' divide, guys easily made heroic and inaccessible by their specific knowledge of what appears to be complexity contained, chaos gauged by meters, controlled by levers and made to output itself, quantized: electricity.
This is decidedly a skewed view, one made possible by a vague understanding of how these machines work communicated mainly through three-page essays with titles like: Michael Faraday: Taming Electricity, and Maxwell's Darling Demon. These essays tend to hero worship, furthering the "Myth of the American Inventor," a phrase from an apropos scene in The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon).
Briefly, the scene: protagonist Oedipa Maas is touring the R&D side of a large aerospace engineering corporation, Yoyodyne. She talks to a young inventor-hack, a guy made cynical and distracted by the routine of his job. She mentions that she didn't think people invented anymore: "I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?" And the engineer explains that what's taken the risk and reward away from invention is the patent system and corporate-owned intellectual property. The myth, "one man per invention," is not borne out by experience. Disillusionment with the present ensues, and so does the aggrandizement of the past that is often coincident with disillusionment. So the myths persist.
Thinking I might investigate the focus of some rather mythical ideas I have about machines, I toured the Georgetown Steam Plant, home of three turbines that once powered Seattle's cable car system and provided electricity for the Georgetown neighborhood, an industrial zone wholly inhospitable to sentiment, what with the emphasis on distribution rather than consumption: lots of barbed wire, loose gravel, nondescript warehouses, and desolate backdoor break areas composed of mismatched, often broken chairs that suggest a contingent comfort, a waiting space for something that already happened.
It was a fine setting for a visit to past circumstances, their focus being industry enabled by new ways to move stuff, lots of it, around. It's fitting that Boeing field edges the steam plant to the south because riding up to the plant, one sees it's planes doing the moving of stuff, not the cable cars the steam plant once powered. With 1906 moulded in poured concrete on the building's neoclassic-revival style facade, the planes are a superfluous counterpoint to the building's outmoded utility.
But then you go inside, and you see the machines themselves, and you start to think that if utility had a distributor, the steam plant could surely still be it. The turbines are big, and the intracacy of their sprawl beautiful. That they're still "fully functional" is all the more tantalizing, given their current quiescence. Around the base of one machine steam or smoke whorled suggestively.
Next: The love affair continues, culminating with: robots.
posted by evelyn at 2:50 PM
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