Leonardo Machine Research (Spring '09)

"For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker" - Fritjof Capra paraphrasing Leonardo da Vinci's famous quote "For a man who knows how, it is easy to become universal...", from The Science of Leonardo.

I have been exploring the idea of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) as an assemblage of forces embodied in an individual that contains a memetic lineage, or line of flight, to digital media through his research in optics, especially perspective, and through his conceptual fusion of anatomy and mechanics. Both of these conceptual devices for perceiving the world can be related to the "Cartesian Theatre of the Mind" and the "Machinic Body". These two abstract concepts can be in turn related to the current technologies of 3D virtual reality (perspective) and robotics (mechanics). The painting technique pioneered by Leonardo (and later used developed by Durer), by using a plane of glass with lines drawn on it to impose a mathematical model of linear perspective on perception, is like looking through a computer screen at a virtual reality. 3D computer programs use similar Cartesian coordinates and math to create the same illusion of perspective. On the mechanics side, in addition to the idea of the body as a machine, Leonardo’s early classifications of abstract mechanisms can be linked to Franz Reuleaux’s morphology of mechanisms in the 19th century, and which are still the basis of machine and robot engineering today.   

Perspective as a Perceptual Apparatus:

"Perspective is nothing else than seeing place [or objects] behind a plane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind that glass are to be drawn. These can be traced in pyramids to the point in the eye, and these pyramids are intersected on the glass plane." - Leonardo

Mechanics as a Perceptual Apparatus:

"Spectator of this human machine, do not sadden for having to make it known through the death of others, but rejoice that our God has devoted his intellect to the perfection of this tool." - Leonardo da Vinci (written on page of anatomy notebook next to the drawing of a human skull) on the concept of the body as a machine.

Line of Flight to Mechanical Automata:

Leonardo designed some of the earliest mechanical automata. Here are examples of a robotic car and knight drawings from his notebooks, and later re-created:

"Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences..." - Leonardo

Line of Flight to Reuleaux:

Here is a simple screw-gear machanism drawing by Leonardo, and later created by Franz Reuleaux (1829-1905), who is famous for categorizing basic mechanisms used in machines at the turn of the 20th century. I really like the abstract beauty of the Reuleaux collection of kinetic mechanisms at Cornell University, which serve no specific function other than to show a general mechanical technique. I feel like these represent anatomical maps of a developing technological species:

Line of Flight to Textiles, Babbage, and Computers:

Textile machines were some of the earliest machines, and led to some of the first factories of the industrial age.Textiles are also interesting in that they produce clothing, which is a virtual skin, and directly related to human identity. Textile machines also conceptually lead to the modern computer through Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was based on the Jacquard Loom. Here are some of Leonardo's textile drawings:

...the Jacquard Loom:

and Babbage's Analytical Engine:

Line of Flight to Duchamp:

I see a conceptual and aesthetic line of flight from Leonardo to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Duchamp was compared to Leonardo and did work, such as 1000's of notebook sketches in The Green Box as preperation for the mechanistic sculpture The Large Glass. He also did optical mechanical studies and kinetic sculptures, that related directly to Leonardo's influence.

Picasso, Picabia, Manray, Tinguely, Dali, Magritte, Cornell, Hockney, etc:

There are conceptual lines of flight to these other artists through Leonardo and Duchamp. Duchamp directly connects to the Cubists, Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists. All of these movements were related to technology and the industrial mechanization of the early 20th century. There are also conceptual lines of flight to Marxism, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, in regards to machines. These lines of flight have taken my research towards the history of technology, technological determinism, and the aesthetics of technology. Specifically I am exploring the abstract kinetic beauty of technology as evolving patterns and code in both nature and culture, and of technology as a living species. This and other research makes me speculate that humans have always been co-evolving with machines, and there is a definite direction towards computers, cyborgs, robots, and ultimately a technological singularity.

Lines of Flight to Surrealism to Virtual Reality:

Dali was said to be obsessed with Leonardo, and incorporated many Leonardo references in his paintings, such as Atomic Leda referencing Leonardo's lost painting Leda and the Swan. Magritte's "This is not a pipe" clearly points out the representational modeling of Renaissance painting, using the perspective and shading developed in Leonardo's time, to create a virtual 3D reality, but then breaks the Cartesian illusion with the text.



 

"Mechanization has revolutionized the world - antithesis of the circumstantially indispensible Futurism - has confirmed the deepest change that humanity has ever undergone. A post-machinist state of mind is in the process of being formed: the artists of today have created a new art in harmony with this state of mind."- Dali & Montanya, The Yelllow (Anti-Art) Manifesto