Woyzeck

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Automatons

This fascination with the precisely controlled human form can be seen earlier in culture in the eighteenth century craze for automata, many of which had a human form. In Devices of Wonder, Frances Terpak writes, "Automata reached the height of their popularity in the eighteenth century largely due to the lifelike flute player, drummer, and duck built by Jacques de Vaucanson between 1733 and 1739" (268). While many eighteenth century automatons were built as toys or popular entertainment, many also served an educational purpose. Barbara Maria Stafford writes in Devices of Wonder, "His [Vaucanson's] subtly blowing and fingering flute player (1738; whereabouts unknown) demonstrated the basic Cartesian principle that the body was a machine and that its multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, and veins operated just like the wheels and weights running a clock" (43-44). Here we can see some similarities between Vaucanson's automaton and Craig's Übermarionette. Neither are intended to replace the human body, and both illustrate the theory that the human body can behave with the precision of a machine, either invoking the delicate movements of a trained musician in Vaucanson's case or the choreographed gestures of a puppet in Craig's case.

These ideas may sound a bit threatening even today, so many years after automata have much less power in popular culture. Anxieties about people becoming machine-like or machines becoming people-like still fuel many a Hollywood blockbuster, such as Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001), to cite only one recent example. Stafford notes that the mimetic anxieties of today may be more biological in nature: By now our anxieties have been flattened by the siren call of wireless products that make all operational functions compact, tinier, invisible. [...] Then there is the worrisome reality of genetic engineering, all too ready to manufacture uncontrollable substances out of recombinant DNA. [...] Such seductive innovations invoke the mimetic goals of eighteenth-century "philosophical" puppets running not off of high-power microcomputers but on hundreds of diminutive interlocking cogs and springs. (43)

Similar to the fear and criticism directed toward cloning research today, eighteenth century automaton makers were also subject to such anxieties, which made their trade at times dangerous. In Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Michael Taussig connects this fear with a larger fear of mimesis in general. Taussig writes: Jacquet Droz, père (1721-1790), was invited to Madrid by the King of Spain where his automatons nearly cost him his life. The Inquisition accused him of sorcery, reminding us of Horkheimer and Adorno's major thesis that civilization (meaning Western civilization--the civilization of Capital) has replaced "mimetic behavior proper by organized control of mimesis." (215) Taussig goes on to connect the fear of mimetic automatons to fears of images, actors, and all those considered other by Colonialist standards.

Despite the anxiety it produces, there remains a general fascination with creations that mimic the human form and its abilities with precision. This fascination with the control of the human form, with bodies moving in precision, is also a theme in the script of Woyzeck, so it makes sense to use stylized movement choreography and mimetic technology, such as AR, to tell the story of Woyzeck. Perhaps AR is for twenty-first century audiences what mechanical automata were for eighteenth century audiences. The experience of automata has something in particular in common with the digital cinema "automatons" of AR--a feeling of the uncanny.