The Lost Society of Senses

When the hand ceased to draw, the cyborg sang.

Have you ever had a glimpse of how our culture could have gone in a completely different direction?

Etienne-Jules Marey –La circulation du sang à l'état physiologique et dans les maladies, Paris, G. Masson, 1881, p. 214.

I’ve been swimming in these waters ever since I started investigating Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), a nineteenth-century inventor who trained as a physician to please his family, despite never having had a single patient in his life. His Parisian ”practice” had a room filled with technical paraphernalia and another with animals of all kinds, described by the famous photographer Nadar: “everywhere, in every corner, life”. Today, a few of us know his chronophotography (sequential images detailing a single movement such as bird flight), but not many have come across his graphic renderings accompanying them. The Sphygmograph (image above) was Marey’s first device: attached to the wrist, it had a sensor connected to a stylus receiving the movement of the pulse, and which scraped a surface covered in smoke revealing a white line translating blood circulation into a readable pattern. This is the core of Marey’s life project: to make nature, that is, movement, speak in lines and diagrams which could be interpreted through a combined optical, linguistic, and mathematical effort.

“Everywhere, in every corner, life”, was the core of his life-spanning research. But, in this new form of knowledge, the articulation of the senses is reorganised: the hand is idle, the machine writes, the eye reads and analyses. Marey’s work was at the crossroads of art, biology, motion capture technology, medicine, and… cinema. The latter is an unjust, albeit official relation: Marey is often hailed as a pioneer of cinema, a sort of French Eadweard Muybridge. Which was precisely what he didn’t want to be. At the end of the century, when cinema seemed inevitable, doppelgangerly, in the hands of a few brothers (the Skladanowsky in Berlin or the Lumière in Paris), Marey also held its possibility in his hands. But he fell out with Georges Demenÿ, his excitable, former gymnast assistant, when the latter pressured him into following the next obvious chronophotographic step: to animate the strips of film created at the revered inventor’s lab, la Station Physiologique. Mais non…. Why replicate what we see rather than extracting what we don’t, and with data?

Trace of repeated muscular contractions. From Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris 1875, p.194

Étienne-Jules Marey. Chronophotograph of a pelican in flight, circa 1882.

How fascinating, to be on the verge of such an abysmal change, and looking the other, less spectacular, more experimental way. Had we followed Marey, perhaps we’d have, rather than a société du spectacle, a société des sens. Conversely, how impossible is it to stop what many call progress, which is to say, to compulsively concretise an evident, logical technological development? Progress is decided by intelligence and not astuteness–and one must admit that the first is nothing without the latter.

As far as I can tell, we’re still in the development of the Victorian turn, with its increasing interest and concomitantly increasing demand of images one may hold in one’s hand. Images replicated and distributed, and images one can project onto a screen and hold again, either static or in constant motion. Queen Victoria started the trend of the Christmas card and upheld its prevalence through a Royal Warrant to Raphael Tuck in 1893 to produce them massively. I remember reading French books where children were gifted “images", which were simply cards with lovely drawn or photographed things to look at. Born in the seventies, I found it risible that generations up to my parents’ were entertained by a mere static image, addicted as I was to watching The Twilight Zone and Family Ties on any of the two TVs we had in our small flat. But the card industry, which must have made a few families very rich, was rendered obsolete by photographic omnipresence, but even more so by the mass production and sale of the instantaneous, portable, film colour camera. My generation, and my children’s, however, were still the proud owners of stickers and sticker books for Pokemon or football leagues. Obsolescence is proof that machines are like us, they live and they die, and they haunt us. Tacita Dean is the pleureuse, the weeper and the whisperer of celluloid. While images persist, grow and gain sharpness, their automated conjurors retire in rusty irrelevance.

Obsolescence is what turned some of us into neo-luddites–quitting Instagram for Bluesky, going off grid on YouTube, disdaining podcasts in favour of texts (written on a computer). Being a neo-luddite condemns us to an impossible technophobia, which separates us from the technophile in attitude only (how else can we exist?): the latter is a happy-go-lucky brain rotted gamer or an Apple Watch wearer and visitor of immersive environments with neon lights. Not us! But why live at the edge of this suspicious dichotomy? I raise you the other creature, the technology absolving machinist. I fancy the word “machine”. Italians call cars "la macchina”–the machine. In Portugal we had an ad for something I only remember as not being a machine, which sang “that machiiiiine”. Read: “that efficiencyyyyy”. The etymological endurance of the word proves its seductive idea: today, it can mean “structure” but it has also absorbed all the other previous meanings. In Middle French it meant "device, contrivance” deriving from the Latin machina, "machine, engine, military machine”. It also meant “device, trick or instrument". Machina came from the Greek makhana, Doric variant of Attic mēkhanē "device, tool, machine" meaning also "contrivance, cunning". While the machine as device, mechanism, instrument, was associated with trick or cunning, it’s now synonym of structure, organisation, efficiency. There’s a running correlation between the machine and a form of suspicious or overpowering intelligence.

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), who published a memoir brilliantly named How to become a sorcerer, and from whom the escapologist Harry Houdini borrowed his name, established conjuring shows by studying, amongst other things, the few automated machines available then¹. He inquired about Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck (1765), which was an automated bird who ate and defecated, and the famous chess playing and definitely unwoke automaton, The Mechanical Turk. Both automata could move but could not do what they claimed–the duck had a stash of poo ready to be squirted out, and inside the chess playing automaton was a person making the moves. Much like today, the real astuteness was the prowess of making an inanimate thing move, while our imagination was incensed with the possibility of a machine behaving like a person. In the case of the mechanical chess player, it was a hoax operated with magnets and in the case of the duck, something was activated, but without any biomechanical transformation taking place. It was the optical delusion that fascinated Houdin, who created what we now enchantingly call a magic show, which proves that looking is very often not seeing.

On the other side of the spectrum, Houdin also looked at the Jacquet Droz automata (1768–74), considered the distant cousins of the computer, which are dolls who can write, play music, and draw through an earnest device activated by a coded–and therefore programmable–system. The trickster automatons such as the digesting bird, on the other hand, rely on your suspended disbelief. Ultimately, you know that your eyes deceive you, either because they’re not fast enough, or because something else is happening outside of their reach. Whether you want to know what happens or you withhold the magic is a matter of personal preference or neurological wiring presumably–suspending disbelief is subjective.

Going deeper into the etymology of the word “machine” takes us to the Doric variant *magh-ana- meaning "that which enables," from the root *magh- "to be able, have power”–which some claim, and others dispute, to be the root of the verb “may” as well. The notion of ability is one I’m particularly touched by because the power we yield over the planet, but more importantly, the power we have as a species relies on technology. We would not be here, were it not for our ability to machinise: left alone in the woods, a pre-verbal child will most likely die, or be raised by an animal and therefore never learn how to speak or write. Humankind is inherently unable on its own, which is why technology is so important but should be constantly discussed. Our ableing is destroying ecosystems and species.

Each new machine invented by humans became a transformative mirror. But the machine of our bodies is as mesmerising as the devices which record it, translate it or hallucinate its magnificence. Beyond realistic, faithful images of the world, bodies, things, movement, there were also translations into lines, patterns, shadows, which intercepted inner workings, captured, enhanced and directed the forces of organisms and their energy. Light and heat were seen, for a historical minute, as the soul of vapour, flame, fibre, the energy flowing “everywhere, in every corner”. Air was not longer emptiness, but energy and matter, smog, sound, pressure, vapour.

The nineteenth century is awash with phenomenal people who looked at the world in this way, but who are often deemed difficult to pin down. We prefer to label them as “pioneers”, Great Men. If you read accounts of Marey’s work, there is always a remark about the awkward fluidness of his output. But what strikes me most in this epistemological fate of vagueness is its anachronistic concern. Marey was always clear about his project: understanding and analyzing movement, for which he perfected and created an array of recording and rendering machines. Our puzzled concern with labelling his work relies simply, I suspect, on the fact that on one side, we adore his images and we want to claim them for art, and, on the other, because there was a fluidity in nineteenth century creative endeavours which we ultimately find gauche: it’s with disappointment that some find out that his photo work was more graphic than photo, and had a physiological purpose. In fact Marey created what he called “épures”, that is graphic extractions, or “geometric chronophotographs” from the over-defined images of his subjects.

Homme-Squelette/Skeleton–Man wearing a black suit with white lines allowing for a record of the limbs’ movement during the sequential photography of his action.

Marey himself considered his images unappealing. Nevertheless, one must admit that he indulged in experimentations–there are some photographic and graphic bodies of work in his portfolio exploring possibilities without a precise outcome. And the question is also to inquire: what exactly is the outcome of technological potentialities? How far do we take it? Can’t we also remain in an epistemological suspension and take pleasure in the new sensorial, motor, perceptive, affective and intellectual horizons they provide?

In comes Margaret Watts Hughes (1842–1907), a revered Welsh vocalist praised by the most famous singer of the nineteenth century, Jenny Lind (1820–1887), for her vocal range and impeccable interpretation. Watts Hughes was a precise performer indeed, who needed to measure the intensity of her singing. So, in typical nineteenth century fashion, she inventeed the Eidophone, which was a tube shaped like a smoking pipe, one extremity covered with a membrane and the other made to be sung into. The device carried the sound onto the membrane, on which Watts Hughes tried several powders with the goal of watching them be propelled in the air. But surprisingly shapes started to appear, which she called “Voice Figures”.

Page from Margaret Watts Hughes’ The Eidophone (1904)

Cutting loose the relation between the eye and the hand drawing perception’s projected shapes in the mind, brought about a graphic array of writings uncannily provided by “nature”. Margaret Watts Hughes then went on to apply the Eidophone’s membrane onto a glass, creating notations of sound like blooming maritime flowers with detailed textures, readable for those who can. The world could have been a sort of Baudelairian game of “correspondances”, transpositions and transformations. Watts Hughes’ saw her “Impression Figures” (below) as, “by some slight degree, the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe that, we are told in Holy Writ, took its shape in the voice of God”². “Everywhere, in every corner, life”, was the motto for those line followers, trace-makers and interpreters, singers who became inventors, or writers who displaced words and made them smell, or touch. This was not an immersive adventure, but a subtle nudge to the mind, a convincing mapping of other worlds. Playing with encoded metallic and rubber devices, in order to listen, admire, read and marvel, rather than mindlessly replicating, might have been a different story altogether.

Single pitch Impression Figure by Margaret Watts Hughes, pigment on glass, date unknown. Courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery — photography by Louis Porter.

(English version below)

Correspondances

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

— Charles Baudelaire, 1857

Correspondences

Nature is a temple where living pillars
At times allow confused words to come forth;
There man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long echoes which in a distance are mingled
In a dark and profound unison
Vast as night is and light,
Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as prairies
— And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,

Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, myrrh and incense,
Which sing of the transports of the mind and the senses.

— Wallace Fowlie, Flowers of Evil (New York: Dover Publications, 1964)

---

If you’re interested in my writing, and wondering if I take text commissions, I occasionally do. Get in touch below.

1. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Confidences et révélations : comment on devient sorcier, 1868.

2. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturing-a-voice-margaret-watts-hughes-and-the-eidophone/