The waterborne orchestra operated via a rotating drum with pegs that triggered levers to produce different sounds, and other elements allowed the musicians and crewmen to make realistic body movements. The contraption included a four-piece band-a harpist, a flautist and two drummers-accompanied by a crew of mechanical oarsman who “rowed” the musicians around the lake. According to his “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices,” published in 1206, he also designed a water-powered automaton orchestra that could float on a lake and provide music during parties. He invented a mechanized wine-servant, water-powered clocks and even a hand-washing machine that automatically offered soap and towels to its user. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Arabic polymath Al-Jazari designed and built some of the Islamic Golden Age’s most astounding mechanical creations. Painting depicting Al-Jazari’s floating band. The 450-year-old device is still operational today, and is held at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The robot can walk in a square pattern mouthing devotionals, nodding its head and occasionally beating its chest with its right arm and kissing a rosary and cross with its left. Working together, these elements give the impression of a monk deep in prayer. Artificial feet step up and down to imitate walking, and the friar’s eyes, lips and head all move in lifelike gestures. Completed sometime in the 1560s, Turriano’s 15-inch-tall automaton is powered by a wound spring and uses an assortment of iron cams and levers to move on three small wheels concealed beneath its monk’s robe. When the Prince recovered, Phillip II commissioned a clockmaker and inventor named Juanelo Turriano to build a lifelike recreation of beloved Franciscan friar Diego de Alcalá (later Saint Diego). According to legend, Phillip II’s son and heir suffered a head injury, and the King vowed to the heavens that he would deliver a miracle if the boy were spared. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large.The 16th century “mechanical monk” may have been the result of King Phillip II of Spain keeping up his end of a holy bargain. Moreover, it offers examples of how artists and everyday people resisted that stereotype to consider different ways of being human. The case studies in Model Machines chart the representation of Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other examples to show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America. In Model Machines, Long Bui investigates what he calls Asian roboticism or the ways Asians embody the machine and are given robotic characteristics.īui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. In the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity.
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