Page 33 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 33/206
Plateau’s Anorthoscopic disks, with their anamorphically distorted images compensating for the rotation speed of the disc, and the apparent distortion of the image as we see it, are fascinating. A toy that ‘corrects’ the distortions built into a Phenakistoscope disc by means of a clever anamorphic painting - how astonishing!
Charles Babbage: The Difference Engine (A Calculating Machine) 1833
There is an interesting coincidence in that the origin of some of the core media technologies of the 20th/ 21st century emerged in the decade 1830-40. Photography (Daguerre, Niepce and Fox Talbot), the electric telegraph (Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone), computing (Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace) can all trace roots to this decade. And it is the decade that saw the re-publication of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (a modernist, non-linear, multimedia novel), von Stampfer’s stroboscopic animations, Charles Dickens novel serialisations, and Wheatstone’s Stereoscope. Of course, Babbage’s invention of the Difference Engine was a brilliant iteration of a mechanical calculator rather than the beginning of modern digital-electronic computing, but his two major projects, this and his Analytical Engine (started in 1837) are symbolic of a Victorian mind-set groping for a mechanical solution to intractable mathematical problems. In his Analytical Engine, Babbage uses punch-cards (borrowed from Joseph Marie Jacquard’s programmable weaving loom) so that new data and algorithms (code) can be fed into the machine. Though never finished (contemporary manufacturing did not have the precision required for the hundreds of cogs and cams required), it aspired to be general-purpose computer, and inspired a 1990 novel: The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, which kick-started steam-punk - a new media genre. For more on the genesis of computing, see Doron Swade and Jon Palfreman: The Dream Machine (BBC 1993).
What is intriguing about Ada Lovelace is her poetical appreciation of the possibilities she glimpsed for the (later) Analytical Engine: “[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” The contemporary writer Walter Isaacson describes: “When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage’s engine used punched cards to make calculations.”. Babbage had borrowed the idea of punch-cards from Joseph Marie Jacquard, whose textile loom of 1801 used large cards punched with holes to control the mechanised weaving of complex patterns. Furthermore these cards could be strung together to create different patterns or parts of patterns on every row in the fabric. Developing the Analytical Engine, Babbage and Lovelace realised the idea of a ‘stored’ program .