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research 2025
THOUGHTS
Automatons: Symbolic Machines Through Time
23 july 2025
Automatons are self-operating machines—designed to move, respond, or perform tasks without direct human control. But beyond their mechanics, they have always served as mirrors of their time: expressing cultural values, technological imagination, and social hierarchies. From ancient water clocks to 18th-century mechanical tricksters, these devices blurred the line between the magical and the mechanical. Today, automatons have evolved into algorithms, AI systems, and digital labor tools—still performing, still concealing, and still revealing the deeper structures that shape our world.
If al-Jazari’s automata symbolized spiritual cleanliness and cosmic order, what do today’s machines symbolize? Convenience? Control? Invisible exploitation? Could we reimagine them as instruments of care, ritual, or resistance instead?
Machine Tricksters and Spectacles to Hide Workers
The Digesting Duck (Canard Digérateur) built by Jacques de Vaucanson was the size of a living duck and was covered in perforated gold-plated copper to allow a view of the inside workings. It moved like a duck, wiggling its beak in the water, quacking, and most famously though, it could eat pellets offered to it, and then poop them. De Vaucanson claimed that duck contained a small “chemical laboratory” capable of breaking down the wheat grain. In the 19th century, it was found that Vaucanson had faked the mechanism, and the Duck’s poop consisted of pre-prepared breadcrumb pellets, dyed green.
At the end of the 18th century, the Mechanical Turk a chess computer beats none other than Napoleon, and causes a sensation.. but the machine is fake, a chess player is hidden in a cubbyhole under the chess board. Magnets attached to the bottom of the pieces help him to follow the game.. He controls the doll that moves the pieces with levers.
It is proof that people in the 18th century already believed that machines could match or even surpass human intelligence. over time, many machines have been tested with games. First, an AI was on human-level as soon as it could beat the smartest human at chess... this shows that AI is not becoming a human, but a tool to show us what it means to be human.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk) is a prime example of labor exploitation in this age. Mturk commodifies human labor by treating workers as mere data points in a vast algorithmic system, promising workers flexibility, while hiding the harsh reality of precarious labor.
Just as the original turk concealed a human operator to create the illusion of a machine's capabilities…. Amazon is making human effort invisible, promoting the idea of a fully automated economy. Workers on Mturk often complete small tasks for minimal pay… devaluing human effort. Tasks that require significant cognitive labor can pay as little as a few cents.. in contrast to the profits generated by Amazon.
Contemporary practices
This is a reimagining of the narrative of ‘Huma’, a powerful Middle Eastern jinn or genie. Often depicted as a female, horned three-headed spirit, Huma is thought to be responsible for causing a fever. Allahyari rewrites the narrative, envisioning Huma using her heat-related powers as means of moderating the planet’s temperature, countering the effects of global warming. This video and 3D printed sculpture form part of a wider body of work by the artist that reinterprets monstrous female figures of Islamic mythical origin. Allahyari is interested in “re-figuring”, a form of feminist practice whereby artists reclaim the past to re-imagine different forms of present and future. In this work and others, she counters Western-centric perspectives on present challenges such as climate change.
Sources
https://aljazaribook.com/en/2019/07/30/the-basin-of-the-peacock_en/
https://archive.org/details/cover_20200113_2057/page/n103/mode/2up
Costs of connection - Nick Couldry + Ulises A. Mejias
Ideas
1. Red, glossy, devilish bloated forms — represent the most influential figures in contemporary big tech. Male-coded and corporate, they grip each other tightly by their ties, eyes glowing red with embedded LED lights. Steam escapes from their nostrils as their interlocked grasp intensifies. Forming a closed circle, they enclose the solitary ‘user’—at the center—who is being classified, optimized, reduced, and monetized. The collective posture evokes the familiar scene of a child being cornered in a schoolyard: an act of domination masquerading as order. The figures are unmistakable: Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella—CEOs whose platforms and decisions shape our digital life. Once dubbed “social media,” these platforms now operate as extractive content infrastructures. Together, these individuals oversee vast systems of AI deployment, automation, data labor, content moderation, platform governance, and algorithmic surveillance. Their symbolic entanglement illustrates both competitive aggression and systemic complicity—a self-sustaining loop of techno-capitalist power. As public figures, they must be held accountable—not only for the technologies they unleash, but for the structural conditions they continue to reinforce.