I just returned from Hungary: there’s a great exhibition in the Mücsarnok (Kunsthalle) Budapest titled “Kempelen – Man in the Machine”. Actually you can see a piece of work from me in the exhibition: kII (Kempelen 2.0), a voicetopological interface for the Phonetic Kemp Inc, I founded together with Georg Winter, who exhibits a brandnew UKIYO CAM device: mobile phone ‘harajuku’.
Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 – 1804), an austrian/hungarian Inventor, became famous because of his Chess Playing Turk, an advanced automat which was kind of a fake, because a real chess player was sitting inside. While he cheated his audience for quite a long time, others reported that his magical device has also been used to smuggle prisoners out of kingdoms, which gives the whole device a totally different point of view. I don’t know though, how realistic Edgar Allen Poe’s short story Von Kempelen and his Discvoery is…
John Gaughan’s reconstruced Chess Player can also be seen at the Exhibtion.
more pictures from the exhibition…
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Kempelen is more important to me because of his development of one the earliest talking machines. In 1770 he published a book called “Mechanik der menschlichen Sprache”. If anyone knows where to get a digital copy of this, I’d be very thankful for a comment at the bottom of this page. I just found one original US$ 9.600,- book.
I think it’s a shame that there is no digital version online, because Kempelen himself published his book about empiric phonetics and released plans of his talking machines, so that other can study and rebuild and therefore improve it. He wanted to help the voiceless with his technical inventions; and when we remember that even if the first gestural languages have been developed since the end of the 18th century, getural languages are seen as an equal language to the oral speech only since the 20th century.
So Kempelen clearly had an open source spirit: that’s why my kII (Kempelen 2.0) is also open source, of course!
An antique Version of his book “Mechanik der menschlichen Sprache”, as well as one original talking machine from the “Deutsches Museum München” 1 2 3 (which sadly does not work anymore, because the used gums got hard over time), can be seen in the Kempelen Exhibition.
more pictures from the exhibition…
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Besides the historical relevant pieces, some modern art objects can be seen in the exhibition that will also come to Germany in June (until August: ZKM Karlsruhe). Personally I was very interested in Martin Riches’ Talking Machine (1989-1991) that works with pipes formed analogue to the inner mouth space. A computer is used to type words and controls the airflow into those pipes. Quite interesting, because on my work with the SpeakJet Chip (see SpeakJet>previous entries to learn more about this), most people want to control the language output by Computer keyboard input. I think this may be a deadend for realtime applications, ’cause the written language is so different from the spoken one. Nevertheless the work of Martin Riches is very charming and quite joyful! Note the stunning age of the work: remember how long 20 years are in terms of technical developments!
Also worth mentioning are the works of Ken Feingold who lets jury members find you guilty by using randomized computer spoken phrases. Simon Penny shows a pretty clever balanced robot on bike-wheels that interacts with visitors and Jan Zappe and Matthias Gommel from robotlab are showing a portraying industry robot.
Finally I’d like to point out Georg Winter’s very “handy” work as part of our project Phonetic Kemp Inc: UKIYO CAMERA SYSTEMS mobile phone ‘harajuku’. The “machine in the man” opens up a completely new understanding of telecommunication with the aid of translingual code that may emancipate and reactivate interhuman communication.
Dates:
· Kunsthalle Budapest, Hungary
23. March 2007 – 28. May 2007
· Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie – ZKM Karlsruhe, Deutschland
23. June 2007 – 19. August 2007
Participating Artists:
Ken Feingold, Péter Forgács, Severin Hofmann, David Moises, György Jovánovics, Gergely László, Péter Rákosi, Gyula Pauer, Katrin von Maltzahn, Simon Penny, Martin Riches, Tamás Waliczky, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, Róbert Langh, Márton Fernezelyi, Richárd Aczél, Robotlab, Georg Winter, Michael Markert.
Links:
· Related Articles on audiocommander.de
· kempelen.hu Official Exhibition Website
· Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen at de.wikipedia.org (there’s also an entry on en.wikipedia.org, but it contains less information).
· “Kempelen – Man in the Machine” to be seen from March, 23rd to May, 28th 2007 in the Mücsarnok/Kunsthalle Budapest, Hungary
· Afterwards the exhibition can be seen from the 23rd of June to 19th of August 2007 in the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe
