Most weird sci-fi gadgets lose their sense of oddity with time. Heron's aelopile has been on off-the-wall gizmo for 2,200 years. Technically, the aelopile is both a jet engine and a steam turbine, but it's by no means a precursor of any real jet engine or any real steam turbine. The aeopile never seems to have been entirely forgotten or to have fallen out of "use" -- perhaps because the aelopile never achieved any "use." It has no ancestors, no descendants and has never been substantially "improved."
Since an aelopile could hit 500 rpm when properly greased, this was by far the most rapidly moving object known to the ancient world.
You could instantiate an aelopile tomorrow, but what would you do with it? It's is a living-fossil wonder-gadget. It's be guessing that in another 2,200 years, the aelopile will seem about as curious and quirky as it does today.
Tags: Heron aelopile atemporality ancientgreekpunk Alexandria gadget gizmo atemporal living fossil
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This is a modern model of a 500-year-old graphic study by Leonardo Da Vinci. Da Vinci did not make working prototypes of his many fantastic, semi-secret sketches. Although he commonly described himself to patrons as an "engineer," Da Vinci does not seem to have ever successfully built a single functional engine (other than some small, carnivalesque special-effects toys). There are no working technologies attributed to DaVinci as an inventor.
If built to scale, this spindly device would not efficiently cut water-canals. It didn't exist at the time of its conception, it doesn't exist now, and it's not going to exist. The social meaning we attribute to it is not the meaning it had to Da Vinci.
He probably thought about this device for about as long as it took him to draw it: maybe half a day. It then vanished into the dusty notebooks for centuries.
This enticingly ingenious model is conceptual, impractical, nonfunctional, very modern, and also half a millennium old.
We can further intensify the atemporality by imagining a future situation, circa 2509 AD, in which this museum model itself is 500 years old... an archaic conceptual revival of a conceptual archaism.
Tags: atemporal DaVinci model renaissancepunk non-prototype design fiction
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This Babylonian cuneiform is a real-world object. Made of baked clay, it was built to last. However, for several millennia, no one could read what it said. As a message, it suddenly returned to functionality within modern times.
The top part is an address, the ending is a formal salutation, and the two Twitter-length lines in the middle bear the semantic content, which is, basically, "Your instructions have been received and it will be as you say." We also know that it was written by a Babylonian functionary to an Egyptian overlord, but we have no other records of these two people.
So: for a brief while it was bureaucratic news, then it was history, then it was in semantic oblivion for millennia, then it again became history, although in a context so fragmentary that we don't know who sent it, who received it, why, how, or what it means.
Also, it's in an Italian museum vitrine now, although it will likely be stuffed back into some dark, obscure drawer in short order.
Since its creation, it has always remained the same physical object, but its historical context shifts radically.
Tags: cuneiform bureaucracy tweet Babylon Egypt atemporality formal acknowledgment atemporal
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In this late-nineteenth-century cartoon, French futurist and satirist Albert Robida imagines a test-tube baby.
This idea was fantastically shocking at the time of this cartoon; then test-tube babies became a real-world, shocking anomaly; nowadays we have adult test-tube children with their own children.
There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of people produced by "test-tube" methods, so many that we no longer consider this effort remarkable, and the chemistry-set term "test-tube" has fallen out of use within the context of modern technical fertility assistance.
So this is archaic futurism that became "reality," and then became archaic reality. This image was created to provoke a futuristic "wow" factor, but, as time necessarily passed, where did that "wow" go? The prescience of it definitely has some "wow" today, but it's not the same "wow" as Robida's original "wow."
One can have atemporality without any "wow," but a deep understanding of atemporality would, presumably, enable us to map the historical changes in "wow" from an atemporal perspective.
How is it that we know when to say "wow"? Is there an atemporal cultural framework from which we can allow ourselves to say several kinds of "wow" at once?
Can creative artists master this apparent confusion and then deploy it in a way that creates a frisson for others?
As critics, how would we know if artists were doing that well, or badly?
Tags: atemporal Albert Robida satire futurism visionary archaic atemporality cartoon
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Although this image, and these objects, successfully produce a jolt of disbelief, I don't believe that this is true atemporality.
The promotional use of the word "tradition" is of interest, but sushi is quite modern, and not commonly perceived as "traditional."
USB devices are no longer so "futuristic" that attaching sushi to them can emphasize their futurity.
So what we have here is not atemporality, but some common-or-garden surreality, an amusing jeux d'esprit, a sister effort to Salvador Dali's use of a fake lobster as a telephone handset, the "Aphrodisiacal Telephone" of 1936.
It might be counter-argued that a digital device with "memory" must have some atemporal aspects. Also, the fact that a USB "plug" is still archaically called a "disk" is of interest.
Tags: atemporal atemporality sushi USB memory
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