White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Have done with childish days–
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

JJ Grandville’s marionettes from “Un Autre Monde”

J. J. Grandville was the pseudonym of  French caricaturist and illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard. His early carreer consisted of regular contributions of highly satirical political caricatures for a series of Parisian periodicals. He garnered a great deal of popularity for this work but following the reintroduction of censorship of caricatures in France in 1835, he pursued a notable career as a book illustrator. He illustrated a number of standard works gaining a reputation as the premier illustrator of works such as Gullivers Travels and Robinson Crusoe. His fantastical ilustrations featured a wonderful variety of inanimate objects brought to life, mixed up animal creatures (which he refered to as Metamorphoses) , crazy characters and an imaginative creativity that predated and influenced the school of Surrealism.

 

 

Gentleman

The concept of the nineteenth-century Gentleman is a complex one, though it is one which is, as one recent critic has noted, “the necessary link in any analysis of mid-Victorian ways of thinking and behaving.” The Victorians themselves were not certain what a gentleman was, of what his essential characteristics were, or of how long it took to become one. Why, then, were so many of them so anxious to be recognized as one?

Members of the British aristocracy were gentlemen by right of birth (although it was also emphasized, paradoxically enough, that birth alone could not make a man a gentleman), while the new industrial and mercantile elites, in the face of opposition from the aristocracy, inevitably attempted to have themselves designated as gentlemen as a natural consequence of their growing wealth and influence. Other Victorians — clergy belonging to the Church of England, army officers, members of Parliament — were recognized as gentlemen by virtue of their occupations, while members of numerous other eminently respectable professions — engineers, for example — were not.

The concept of the gentleman was not merely a social or class designation. There was also a moral component inherent in the concept which made it a difficult and an ambiguous thing for the Victorians themselves to attempt to define, though there were innumerable attempts, many of them predicated upon the revival in the nineteenth century of a chivalric moral code derived from the feudal past. Sir Walter Scott defined this concept of the gentleman repeatedly in his enormously influential Waverley Novels, and the code of the gentleman — and abuses of it — appear repeatedly in Victorian fiction. “The essense of a gentleman,” John Ruskin would write, “is what the word says, that he comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred. After that, gentleness and sympathy, or kind dispositionand fine imagination.” Ruskin also maintained that “Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part of their duty of privilege to live on other people’s toil,” but many “gentlemen” did precisely that. Most of our authors have been gentlemen. How does the work of those who were not — Blake, for example, or Thomson — differ from the work of those who were? How could someone like William Morris be both a gentleman and a Marxist? In what ways is the notion of the gentleman implicit in much of the literature that we have read, and when, historically, does the term begin to lose its meaning?

Charles Dickens, like Kipling, was an author of relatively humble origins who desired passionately to be recognized as a gentleman, and insisted, in consequence, upon the essential dignity of his occupation. Great Expectations, which contains a great deal of disguised self-analysis, is at once a portrait or a definition of Dickens’s concept of the Gentleman and a justification of his own claim to that title. Thackeray , on the other hand, insisted (and the two old friends quarreled over this matter) that a writer of novels could not be a gentleman. The debate over just what constituted a gentleman raged on in many contexts, but nowhere was it contested so fiercely as within Victorian literature itself, appearing in works as different as Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.

Eventually, the Victorians settled on a compromise: by the latter part of the century, it was almost universally accepted that the recipient of a traditional liberal education based largely on Latin at one of the elite public schools — Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so on — would be recognized as a gentleman, no matter what his origins had been.

The Turk

The Turk, the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight’s tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.

The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was initially revealed only in the 1820s by the Londoner Robert Willis. The operator(s) within the mechanism during Kempelen’s original tour remains a mystery. When the device was later purchased and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the chess masters who secretly operated it included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger.

Automata

René Descartes is one of the leading lights in this debate on whether animals are automata. His view was that because animals don’t have a sophisticated propositional language then animals are mere automata. However, he had to get around the problem this would cause for his understanding of human beings. As human beings are part of the animal kingdom, he didn’t want them to be seen as not having mental events, “souls” or minds as this would conflict with his views of humans.

While he concluded that human bodies are automata, he took the view their soul was not. In the ‘Discourse on Method’ Descartes concluded that through our use of language we can discover humans have mental events, and therefore a soul, since human consciousness can be demonstrated through the ideas and concepts we are able to communicate through language. Animals don’t have language. Ergo they don’t have mental events or thus a soul.

He thought this was the way forward to prove the argument that although human bodies are mere automata, the capacity for speech was proof there was a substance that went beyond the automata of the biological machine. Strangely Descartes thought that regardless of a human’s capacity for language we should accept all humans have souls, as well as an automata body. This led Descartes to the dualist model of ‘mind’, that is minds and bodies are separate ‘things’. Descartes thought he had solved the animal/ mind question through asking why, if animals are so smart, don’t they talk to us? (“Discourse on Method” Part Five). For Descartes that was enough proof: animals didn’t have a soul, as they couldn’t communicate with us. The soul, mind, consciousness, call it what ever you will is not an automata.

Descartes was travelling, he told his companions, with his young daughter Francine; but the sailors had never seen her, and, thinking this strange, they decided to seek her out one day, in the midst of a terrible storm. Everything was out of place; they could find neither the philosopher nor the girl. Overcome with curiosity, they crept into Descartes’s quarters. There was no one there, but on leaving the room, they stopped in front of a mysterious box. As soon as they had opened it, they jumped back in horror: inside the box was a doll-a living doll, they thought, which moved and behaved exactly like a human being. Descartes, it transpired, had constructed the android himself, out of pieces of metal and clockwork. It was indeed his progeny, but not the kind the sailors had imagined: Francine was a machine. When the ship’s captain was shown the moving marvel, he was convinced, in his shock, that it was some instrument of dark magic, responsible for the weather that had hampered their journey. On the captain’s orders, Descartes’s “daughter” was thrown overboard.

Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

If you can behold it,
I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend,
And take you by the hand, but then you’ll think,–
Which I protest against,–I am assisted
By wicked powers.

The Winter’s Tale, Act 5 Scene 3

Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the muscular requirements of work, automation greatly decreases the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well. Automation plays an increasingly important role in the world economy and in daily experience.

Tentacle

A lot of these images were sourced from the tumblr blog “Vulgar Army“.

The intent behind Vulgar Army is to identify and criticise themes in the use of the octopus as a metaphor in propaganda and political cartoons, as well as identify its relation to popular culture.

It seems to me that [the Octopus] can also be connected to the rise of modern communication and travel (railways, telegraphs, etc) and to the rise of global companies, global military aims and political movements. Which is precisely the sort of thing the [Alien] embodies – an imperialist philosophy, communication (his signal modulator), new weaponry, new tech, etc – and which the other characters talk about too (i.e. Palmerdale with the wireless telegraph, etc).

The most salient physical feature of the octopus/squid is its many arms – which is graphically perfect for representing ‘global reach’ of the kind attributed to countries, companies, ideas, technology, imperialist armies, etc… especially in an age of expansion (or, to use our terms, globalization). In political posters, the octopus is constantly represented hugging a map or globe, with its arms in many places.

– Shabogan Graffiti‘s review of “Horror of Fang Rock”

The cephalopod as a whole class of animals is by far the most extraordinary animals in the world because they have a combination of clear and provable extreme intelligence, but also they are radically alien to our whole – you know, they don’t even have bilateral symmetry. They have completely – they are totally alien. All of things that we look like we share, like eyes, was totally independently evolved.

These are, essentially, alien beings, and if you start to think about the qualities of the cephalopod, to me it’s partly the mutability and the protean nature of it that makes it so exciting. And that’s why the octopus, with all due respect to cuttlefish, squid, nautiluses and so on, they to me are sort of the stepping stones on the telos of the octopus, because the octopus is the most protean of all, it has the least-defined shape.

- From China Mieville’s lecture, “The Weird: A Discussion of Fiction and Politics”

There is something very specific about the octopus which is, to my knowledge, very much unique among animal symbolism, which is that it manages to combine from the late 19th century on, certainly from the early 20th century on, it manages to combine being tremendously semiotically powerful and fecund with absolutely no given about what it is it’s symbolising.

So, simultaneously, you have the octopus used as the symbol for the international Jewish financial conspiracy, international Bolshevism, and then at exactly the same time this is going on in 1934, you have Hugo Geller, the socialist artist, depicting capital itself as an octopus strangling the worker, and so on.

It’s extremely symbolically powerful, but for what? For everything, and therefore for nothing.

- From China Mieville’s lecture, “The Weird: A Discussion of Fiction and Politics”

Pretend-Pitch Visual Material 7-3-11

1: THINGS FROM LAST YEAR

2. TAKING THESE FURTHER

 

3. BALLARAT ARCHITECTURE

4. STEAMPUNK

5. STILLS FROM “MR GUN”

6. STILLS FROM “ARMS RACE”

7. AUTOMATONS

8. MARTIANS?

9. OTHER INFO

Target Audience
Genre fans ?? – ??

Format
Shortish, maybe 20 minutes

Shooting on
Hi-def video

Location
Probably Ballarat

Post
Fairly extensive matte work