So I’m back…again.
I spent the frigid winter in a manor by the coast after my court physician told me a spell in warmer climates might aide to “slayeth the bad humours”.
Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. That last sentence wasn’t quite true. Nonetheless. I haven’t been doing any writing in quite some time because, to be as honest as a sodium pentathol elemental, I’ve been less inspired than the architecture in Soviet-colonised Boredomland. There’s two flighty metaphors in quick succession… Caught those? Still alive and kicking? That’s good. Anyway, with a change of colour scheme comes a change of topic and, appropriately (I guess) for such a lengthy interlude (also in the interests of writing something of slightly broader interest than my usual choice of material), I’m going to take the focus away from the pop-culture banquet platter to wax philosophical for a bit.
I spend a lot of time working around machines. Specifically, machines marketed to the general public consumer base. Like the card-carrying consumer junkie I am I also tend to spend a lot of my disposable income on technology. Going to buy a new toy, whether it be a computer, camera lens, graphics tablet, cassette player (no! Bad Cameron! Shove this paragraph bum-first back through the time portal and get out of the 1980s) or such, you’ll frequently hear the remark “It’s a lovely machine”. I’ve heard that same comment thrown around once or twice when showing a customer a computer at work.
So my question for today is this: can a machine be beautiful?
I should qualify. When I use the b-word, I’m not referring to an objective idea of beauty submitted by popular culture, rather a personal or subjective one. I say that here not with the intent to moralise against the former. I want to draw attention to the fact that in the late nineties and in the era since we have seen an increasing push toward consumer devices becoming smaller, curvier and more stylised, a phenomenon which, notably, has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing ability of virtual graphics technologies to render extremely realistic and lifelike scenes. Clearly, this streamlined aesthetic is the direction that consumer-culture notions of beauty seem to be firmly set on heading in.
However, this fact is relevant to our question for the following reason: Man constructs his inventions in imitation of nature. And nature is, traditionally, the ideal of beauty.
You only need to take a quick look around your immediate surroundings to recognise the extent to which this is true – unless you are reading this blog post from the slopes of an ascetic retreat in the Himalayas, but maybe even then. Devices such as cars, planes, boats, music players, iPhones, they all possess an unnerving familiarity, a ghost of a resemblance to things from the natural world.
And nature is not all sharp edges and protractor-iffic 90 degree angles. Nature is curves, the curling form of a leaf, the figure-8 twist of an elephant’s trunk. Nature is messy, though of course it exhibits a subtle, at-times-literally-mathematical elegance as anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code will be quick to shout out. Nature is also the sleek outline of a cheetah’s hide, which carries with it associations of speed, cunning, athletic prowess and general badassery. This goes some of the way toward explaining the marketing drive of the modern sports car and its more primal connections with the masculine psyche (of which the entire Fast & Furious movie franchise is basically an extension). Many such campaigns, unfortunately, often choose to emphasise the twin elements of speed and aggression, to the detriment of their audience (not least their audience’s safety!) and perceptions of automotive culture in general.
Machines resemble nature, yes, and at the same time, they resemble people. There are many devices out there in the everyday which seem to have a literal or abstract “face”, or other apparatuses, which are vaguely but distinctly humanoid in character. Some examples are things like handheld smartphones, old clothes dryers, ghetto blasters and tape decks, forklifts – the list goes on and on. There is a simultaneously eerie and comforting familiarity to seeing devices such as this that I will talk about in greater detail later on.
Certainly there’s an element of the practical in this type of design. For example, what might be analogous to “fingers” - i.e. the keypad on a smartphone, or the stylus on a tablet - facilitate physical human interaction with such devices; LCD monitors or “faces” allow interaction at the level of the visual i.e. through our eyes, and the speakers or “ears” either side of my computer monitor transmit sound waves to my own ears.
But are such practical considerations merely a side effect of an inherent human instinct to construct things in the image of nature, in the traditional (abstract) locus where beauty is to be found? Or is “the natural” or the “beautiful” in a machine just a by-product of the practical?
After having written several posts with reference to the Pixar movie Wall-E this is one of the most fascinating ideas to come out of that film, that continues to haunt me to this day: When does a machine become invested with a soul? The answer, or the only answer I could find that seemed consistent with the impression given by that movie, was that a machine gains a soul only when its creators have ceased to exist. But I don’t think this is objectively true - rather it seems just one angle of looking at a much larger picture.
To a lesser extent, but still relevant, I’m thinking also of the scene in American Beauty where Caroline arrives home to find Lester’s shiny new 1978 Pontiac Firebird in the driveway, a vignette which is reprised and given additional depth during Lester’s final black-and-white monologue at the film’s conclusion. The image of a man buying his dream car – a symbol of wealth, prestige and material happiness – is excellent material for dissection in line with the film’s argument, that true beauty is something altogether more subtle.
But the inclusion of the Firebird in Lester’s dialogic coda suggests there is a deeper spirituality to the experience, one that transcends the banalities of Western consumer or car culture. What is it? Is it the simple joy of getting what you want? Is the Firebird, for Lester, a symbol of something else, of youthful innocence, of boyhood lost? Is it the car itself? Is there a beauty to this particular machine that requires deeper divination?
I’m not sure to any of these questions, but I do have my own experience to relate. Many nights as of late I’ve found myself going for a walk around the garden to get a breath of fresh air, and I’ll be alone outside, with my brother’s new car parked in the driveway. At some subconscious level, I’m sure, I’ve always wondered if that car wasn’t alive somehow, if those headlights weren’t a pair of eyes looking back at me. It wasn’t a malevolent presence. Just, watchful, I suppose. I could never shake the feeling that machine didn’t have a soul, somehow, that there was an uncanny awareness, like a passive dog dozing with its head in its lap. I’d see the porch light glimmer in shades on the bonnet, and I caught the thought mid-flight making its way across my brain, “That’s a beautiful car”. I knew I wasn’t using the word beautiful in the purest sense that I usually associated with things I found attractive, or wonderful – but all the same, there was something there quite distinct from the shallow commercialised culture of car-worship perpetuated by advertising and media. What was that? I still don’t have the answer. But perhaps you do? I’d be really interested to hear other people’s insights on this. Can machines be truly beautiful? What machines do you find have a kind of beauty? The truth is out there. I think. I could be wrong about that. Maybe. But probably not. I dunno. I haven’t checked recently. Only on a Tuesday. Or was that every second Sunday? Yes. No. Possibly. Hmmm.
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