I recently visited the exhibition “Machine Room of the Gods - How Our Future Was Invented” at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt am Main. The museum specializes in sculptures, and there were three aspects I found particularly noteworthy in the exhibition: that a Eurocentric science history is insufficient if we want to describe humanity’s technological progress, that humans have imagined future technologies since (at least) antiquity, and that technology and art are often interlinked (Brinkmann 2023b, 17).
In relation to my PhD project, I especially found the exhibition’s discussion of the last two points fascinating. Seeing exhibits that show that myths from, for example, Ancient Greece already included imaginaries of technologies we still encounter in modern science fiction was definitely a highlight for me. For example, you can see a depiction of Prometheus tied to a mountain with an eagle eating his liver every day as punishment for giving humans the technology of fire. According to the Argonautika, the eagle was crafted by Hephaistos, the God of metalworking, and was machine-like with the feathers on its wings resembling the oars of a ship (Mayor 2023: 66). In other words, this myth is about an eagle-shaped autonomous drone which flies to and from a mountain in regular intervals to terrorize poor Prometheus.
I also found it intriguing to see how some ancient technological objects aimed at predicting aspects of humans’ physical surroundings also referred to the cultural context in which they were made. The Antikythera, for example, not only quite accurately computed and predicted the position of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets known in Ancient Greece in the first century BC (Pinotsis 2007, 217–18) but also when the Olympic games would take place (K. Efstathiou and M. Efstathiou 2018, 31). This object is, by the way, also the artifact that Indiana Jones is looking for in the latest movie (Mangold 2023). If this motivates you to try and find the Antikythera as well: The original is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, but if Frankfurt is closer to you, the exhibition in Liebieghaus shows a fascinating video detailing the different parts that were revealed in scans of the object.
Throughout the exhibition, it is hard not to compare the depictions of imaginaries and the technological objects on exhibit with the technologies we currently imagine and live with. For example, the replica of al-Jazerî’s goblet clepsydra from the 12th century (Brinkmann 2023a, 212) is a stunning stopwatch functioning on a hydraulic mechanism. While I very much appreciated the ingenuity of the mechanism, I also couldn’t help but notice how much more convenient it is to use my smartphone for that task. Jeff Koons’ work “Apollo Kithara,” one of my definite highlights of the exhibition, also combines aspects of the past with our present. But enough for now, I will write a separate blog post on Apollo Kithara, including some thoughts on the interlinkage between technology and art. So come back soon for that!
References
Brinkmann, Vinzenz, ed. 2023a. Maschinenraum der Götter - Wie unsere Zukunft erfunden wurde: Eine Ausstellung der Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main, 8. März bis 10. September 2023. Berlin, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag.
Brinkmann, Vinzenz. 2023b. “Wie unsere Zukunft erfunden wurde: Eine Einführung in die Frankfurter Ausstellung Maschinenraum der Götter.” In Brinkmann 2023a, 14–23.
Efstathiou, Kyriakos, and Marianna Efstathiou. 2018. “Celestial Gearbox.” Mechanical Engineering 140 (09): 31–35.
Mangold, James. 2023. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Mayor, Adrienne. 2023. “Das Imaginieren von Automaten in der Antike: Mythische Vordenker.” In Brinkmann 2023a, 63–76.
Pinotsis, Antonios. 2007. “The Antikythera Mechanism: Who Was Its Creator and What Was Its Use and Purpose?” Astronomical & Astrophysical Transactions 26 (4-5): 211–26.
As co-leader of The Safer Fieldwork Project, I will be moderating a roundtable on risks and well-being in fieldwork at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association this Thursday (July 27th). Together with the speakers, we wrote an article with first impressions of what we want to discuss there, so have a look at our publication on boasblogs if you are interested to learn more.
Raising awareness of the importance of fieldwork safety is incredibly meaningful to me. At The Safer Fieldwork Project, we argue that researcher safety should be considered an integral part of research preparation and practice throughout the project (see the position paper of The Safer Fieldwork Project, forthcoming). We argue that this is beneficial for the researcher themselves, as well as for their project.
In recent years, more and more academics have started to make the personal consequences of traumatic experiences during fieldwork a topic. These accounts show that such incidents are not isolated and that the negative impact on the person’s physical and/or emotional well-being can outlive the research project for years.
Carrying out fieldwork in situations that entail risks for the researcher beyond a level that is reconcilable with their individual physical and/or emotional well-being also hampers their abilities to conduct research. This is true for their capacities to actively and openly engage with their research field, and to use the insights they gained in the writing phase of the project. I am convinced that we gain more thorough insights and write better papers and theses if we consider our own well-being as an important part of our research.
This week I attended NordiCHI in Aarhus, my first in-person conference in human-computer interaction (HCI). I found it very interesting to see how this research community approaches similar questions from different perspectives, and want to make use of some of my observations there to reflect upon interdisciplinarity in this blog post.
Very generally, I believe that disciplinary boundaries are there to be overcome. There are surely historical, political, institutional and research-tradition-related reasons for disciplines to be and remain separate from each other. However, when looking at specific phenomena, I believe that a plurality of perspectives can only be beneficial, if only to surface contradictions, tensions, or differences of opinions.
As an anthropologist who is also a computer scientist in-the-making, I very much enjoy discussing topics from multiple perspectives. Observing just that as a scientific practice throughout the conference was very inspiring. However, it does not come without challenges. With people coming from a variety of disciplines, their contributions are based on differing assumptions of what researchers should do, and how they should do it.
Particularly the keynote by Kasper Hornbæk on the role of theory in HCI was very inspiring. As an anthropologist, I cannot imagine doing academic work without theory. There are many goals I have for my PhD project, but a very important one is the contribution to theory I plan to provide. My dissertation will be all about applying and combining theories to fit the empirical ethnographic insights I gained through research. By doing that, I intend to both shed light on my insights through theory, but also engage the theory by putting it in dialogue with a specific empirical context.
As I learnt during the conference, some of the other disciplines represented in HCI are not so much about engaging theory, but rather about building prototypes and putting them to a test in order to try to solve pre-identified “real-world” problems. In some cases, I wondered whether the prototypes were really addressing the underlying, structural issues or just providing short-lived band-aid solutions. However, the outcome of these research projects are products intended to help improve people’s lives in tangible ways – to what extent can we say the same about the books we produce in anthropology and adjacent disciplines?
One of the main points of Kasper Hornbæk’s keynote was that HCI would benefit from engaging more with theory. But isn’t it a lot to ask from people who focus on building and improving prototypes to also contribute to theory? And what would that, in turn, mean for disciplines that work intensely on theory – would anthropologists also be required to design prototypes that are meant to solve some of the issues we encounter? And what would they look like?
