Automaton Αυτοματων
Pandora was the proto Eve and the first cyborg, and punishment for man’s hubris. The myth goes that the Gods were angry with man for stealing fire so they asked their best blacksmith, Hephaestus, known for his work building automatons, to create Pandora out of clay so that she could be sent down to earth with an urn full of the worlds horrors and asked not to open it. My piece consists of an approximately two foot tall replica of a Greek urn which displays a small touchscreen. The touchscreen leads the participant through a series of questions. Initially the viewer/participant is asked ‘Would you like to know what Automatons are?” If she answers “yes”; the answer is revealed. However, the screen then flashes a message telling the participant she has lost. The urn, powered by a stepper motor attached to an arduino and controlled camera rig, then cracks slightly. Subsequent questions related to ancient myths, automatons, and cyborgs ensue on the screen, including quotes from Donna Haraway, Hannah Arendt and Mircea Eliade. But, the more the participant requests to “advance” or “learn” by obtaining answers, the more the vessel breaks apart, eventually separating into two distinct halves which clearly reveal the technological mechanisms of its insides. Once fully apart, the game on the touchscreen becomes a new game which asks “What would you like to remove from the world?” Under the hood of the app is a file that saves all the user inputs and collates them into a list of top ten most requested elements. If the user’s answer is one of the most commonly entered, the urn closes back up slightly until it is again closed and the prior game resumes.
Statement to Accompany the Work
The dominant discourse of the Bay Area seems to suggest that increased investment in the technological and the scientific will save us from all things that the technological and scientific brought upon us ( i.e. global warming, social isolation, vehicular deaths, lack of exercise etc.). Though Hephaistos made Pandora out of clay, he was approached by the gods as the craftsman because of his skill in building Automatons (large metal creatures who could think and act). In our place and time, where hardware hacker labs and bio hacking labs appear side by side, this shouldn't seem strange. The Gods sent Pandora to man with a jar of negative things and a bout of curiosity as punishment for Prometheus stealing fire, an act that they feared elevated man to a God-like status. As we currently approach a preoccupation with technology rivaling that of Hephaistos -using CRISPR on human embryos, considering the threats of DNA malware, and storing data in inert DNA -the contemporary echo of the origin of Western civilization portends its termination. I am interested in examining the origin of Western civilization and the impending redaction of it in the same object. If we can recognize the Western idea of progress as both finite and futile, perhaps we can escape it.
