The Artificial Creature

In: Katalog „Being There“ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek/Denmark, 2018

What homo faber – the technically gifted human – has acquired thus far in his ability to intervene in creation, manipulate it or even invent it anew, has long since been preconceived in mythology, literature, art and film. The first artificial creatures originated in literature, being fantasies that attest to the human hubris of usurping god-like status; a striving that continues up to the present day, and which has lost none of its fascination. 

The oldest example for this most likely dates back to 800 years BCE; it is found in the Iliad by Homer, who relates the myth of the Greek god of smiths: Hephaestus, the ugly crybaby of the gods, is cast down from Olympus by his mother Hera, and from this point on, limping, he spends his life as the god of fire and blacksmiths in the volcano of Lemnos, where he creates a whole series of strange creatures. In his great epos, the poet tells of twenty tripod creatures made by the “famed craftsman” Hephaestus that move about on wheels like robots and find their way on their own: “That they could automatically enter the assembly of the everlasting gods.” The unsightly smith is deceived by all of his unfaithful wives and ultimately, he constructs two female servants of gold who are able to think and speak and even carry out a variety of services to please their lord and master: “These are golden, and in appearance like living young women. There is intelligence in their hearts and there is speech in them and strength, and from the immortal gods they have learned how to do things.” These golden girls are, so to speak, the first cyborgs in history. And then, with Pandora Hephaestus creates another artificial woman at Zeus’s behest, one who will bring utter misery and wretchedness to mankind. In order to help this machine of misfortune achieve a perfect imitation, he equips her with the genes of various gods and goddesses: from Aphrodite comes beauty, from Athena craftsmanship and from Hermes, the gift of trickery and the art of seduction. 

Hence, Greek mythology is teeming with artificial creatures, such as the bronze Kouretes soldiers, whom Zeus kills with a bolt of lightning when they attempt – at Hera’s orders – to abduct the child he has with Io. Talos, the giant made of bronze, is a programmed monster as well, who circled the Island of Crete three times a day, warding off all intruders. If anyone nevertheless managed to reach the coast, Talos heated himself up to become red-hot and then embraced the attacker, in the event they had not already fled at the sight of him. 

Also deserving of mention is the sculptor Pygmalion, who carves his female ideal from ivory and falls so deeply in love with his work that the goddess Venus takes pity and makes the sculpture come to life. Not only in the history of literature and art is Pygmalion a recurrent motif; his name has also been firmly established in the sciences: In psychology pygmalionists are people who are sexually aroused by looking at images of saints, statues or dolls. And modern brain research cites the Pygmalion-Effect as being a mechanism of attribution that makes a person feel that objects have come to life and become animated. According to this, we are subject to this effect because it causes us to regard virtual realities as actual realities and for example, to consider robots that look like us and move as we do as being alive. This effect is made touchingly clear in the science fiction film drama Her by Spike Jonze. This film is about a sensitive man who falls in love with a software, a super fast, self-learning operating system with a female voice, who communicates individually with the user, suggesting to him an intensive personal relationship. To his ultimate disappointment, the Samantha “Operating System” turns out to have a promiscuous relationship that is equally intense with thousands of other men.

The figure of the golem, created by the powers of magic, became popular in a trivialized form in the novel published in 1915 by Gustav Meyrink and through the film by Paul Wegener from 1920. Less well known is the origin of the myth in the Sefer Jezirah, the oldest of all cabbalistic texts, which dates from the tenth century, a cosmological treatise considered as being the key to creation. According to this, the Hebrew forefathers possessed the power of creation that enabled them to bring living creatures into this world by reciting the letter combination the Creator used when He made the world. Of course, the myth could not yet have known of the existence of genes, enzymes, or the double helix; but nevertheless, the origin of life is understood as being a code, as a secret text attributed to the Patriarch Abraham, who created the first anthropoid in the form of the golem, and by doing this, imitated God’s creation of mankind. 

The myth of the golem interested and inspired many writers such as Clemens Brentano or Jorge Luis Borges, who expressed their doubts concerning the human will to creation. The cybernetician Norbert Wiener called his last book in 1964 God & Golem, Inc., in which he poses the famous question as to who is supposed to play God if it is not us. He regards the machine as being a modern counterpart to the golem; the creation of intelligent machines by man is something he compares with the creation of mankind by God. 

Finally, the philosopher, science fiction author and by his own admission “disillusioned world reformer” Stanislaw Lem makes a computer named Golem XIV in a novel from 1981 by the same name, which deals with its cold and analytic view of the universe and mankind in the form of an academic lecture. The golem, itself possessing no inherent character or personality, is pure calculation and proclaims to humans that they are an error of nature and that they can no longer keep up with the intelligence of machines. In its lecture, it accuses them of being unable to “assemble a synthetic Homo sapiens – much less a Homo superior – from flesh and blood, just as the cave man was unable to do so, merely because the problem is as unrealizable now as then, you feel an admiration for evolutionary technology, since it has succeeded in doing this.” It terms evolution as “an error that errs,” however: “As a dispatch, the code is a letter, written by nobody and sent to nobody.” What Lem presents here as science fiction in Golem XIV might actually become reality according to an analysis made by philosopher Nick Bostrom. In his book Superintelligence, which was published in 2014, he predicts that by 2075 a machine will have been developed that is on a par with humans with respect to all of its cognitive abilities and which will be able to govern, and perhaps extinguish, us all. As soon as this machine is in a position to correct itself on its own, it will no longer tolerate being influenced by us humans with all our limitations.

In the history of literature and alchemy, there are countless examples of Homunculi-fantasies; above all there is Goethe’s Faust II, in which the famulus Wagner proudly proclaims: “A noble work is just being perfected / What is it, then? / A man is being made.” For all his enthusiasm, the famulus has failed to notice that the devil has conjured up the small creature in the test tube in order to make fun of the presumptuous hubris of the scientist. As the dialogue between Wagner and Mephistopheles continues, the inventor triumphs over the sexuality that is to be banished to the world of lower animals in the future because the artificially sexless creatures are now able to apply themselves to more lofty tasks. This strikes a note which around a century and a half later the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari term “celibate machine,” a combination of the desiring machine and the body without organs. 

As a follower of a vitalistic philosophy of nature, Goethe most likely thought it possible to breed living creatures from organic materials. At the end, he makes his Mephistopheles realize: “Upon the creatures we have / We are, ourselves, at last, dependent.” But the idea and the motif of the Homunculus is not an invention of Goethe. It harks back to the first century to the church father Clement of Rome, who reports of the heretic and sorcerer Simon Magus boasting that he could “animate statues and make the eye-witness think them men.” In addition, the sorcerer purportedly created a person from air, thereby surpassing God, who still needed earth to create Adam, as Simon brags. In 1538 the work De natura rerum by the physician Paracelsus even lists a recipe for creating a Homunculus, whereby human sperm were to be stored for forty days in a vessel at a warm and constant temperature in horse manure. Subsequent to this, it is necessary to nourish this creature with the arcanum of human blood, keeping it at a warm and constant temperature for forty weeks, after which, finally, a human child would come about, though it would be much smaller than a child born naturally. Paracelsus still departs from the notion that it is alone the sperm of the man which is responsible for conceiving the child, and that the woman, by contrast, merely functions as a storage place and “oven”. It follows then that it would seem possible to replace the warm body of the woman with an artificial vessel if it only provided sufficient constant warmth and “putrescence”. Yet in the seventeenth century, there were reports that the alchemist and chemist Robert Fludd was breeding a human head in a retort; and even the personal physician to Louis XIV, Pierre Borel, claimed to be able to bring about a human form by means of distilling human blood. 

In filmmaking, a human bred in a retort shows up in 1916 for the first time: Homunculus is the title of the filmstrip by the actor and director Otto Rippert, for whom the young Fritz Lang had worked as a scenarist. The fairly banal story is quickly told: Although the human created from a chemical base does have superhuman skills, he is not a product of love; thus, he sets out into the world in search of such love. But since he only knows and encounters hatred, he logically develops into a violent tyrant who threatens to destroy the world. Basically, a personality is shown here of a kind we know only too well among human potentates; alone for this reason the effort it takes to breed artificially would have not been necessary.

One of the most famous android creatures in the history of literature is Olimpia from the pen of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In the horror story The Sandman dating from 1815, the student Nathaniel falls in love with a female automaton/artificial woman, whom the machine manufacturer Spalanzani introduces as his daughter. Nathaniel observes Olimpia through a telescope he has purchased from the evil alchemist Coppola, which confuses his senses and ultimately drives him to madness. Despite her somewhat stiff movements, her strangely contorted back, her ice-cold hand and lips, the student falls in love although he continues to be seized by an “inner horror.” Only when the evil Coppola abducts the doll does Nathaniel recognize the deception. His story ends badly nevertheless, because while gazing through the fateful telescope he falls to his death. Incidentally, in the eighteenth century there really was a natural scientist by the name of Lazzaro Spallanzani; one of his many studies dealt with the problem of primal creation and artificial insemination. Hoffmann was fascinated by his research – among other things, the salamander’s ability to regenerate limbs that have been severed.

The novelist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam took a real inventor, namely Thomas Alva Edison, as the model for the engineer who creates an artificial woman from technical components that were modern in those days for his story Tomorrow’s Eve from 1886. The occasion for this is a certain Lord Ewald, who falls in love with a woman, who is beautiful but unfortunately fails to meet his intellectual standards. Using a “photochromic operation” like a scanner, the original woman is reduced to dots a tenth of a millimeter in size and then transferred to “artificial-flesh” made of solidified albumen, ivory humerus and a network of induction wires. Certainly, this artificial ideal of a woman has been outfitted with perfect beauty, high intelligence and cultivated manners, but the coldness of her feelings exerts a frustrating and alienating effect on her admirer.

Literature always manages to achieve what has, to date, remained closed to the realm of science. With his novel Nunquam from 1970, Lawrence Durrell plays upon the technical fantasies and experiments to produce artificial life. In this case, the neurotic chief executive of a global concern called Merlin charges a team of scientists to reconstruct a deceased actress Iolanthe who had been dearly loved by him as a robot woman complete with all of the memories and characteristics she possessed in a way that the android herself does not realize that she is indeed one. The precise replica of Iolanthe down to the last hair turns out so well that it is no longer possible to differentiate it from the living figure. All functions are artificially imitated, the android recognizes all persons with which it was ever in contact and has all human needs. The only thing the scientists are worried about is that the creature thinks and acts so humanly that she might come to understand on her own that she is a fake. What does turn out to be a problem is that although she has been perfectly programmed with respect to her past, she cannot be prepared to encounter the future, which is her ultimate undoing: she breaks out of her prison of luxury, dropping out of society and degenerating to a tramp, murdering a sailor, and finally plunging to her death together with her lover from the balustrade of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In the first half of the twentieth century, science fiction literature was crawling with robot monsters and sorcerer’s apprentices, who emancipated themselves from their creators and mutated into destructive machines. A classic of this genre is Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, which the author published anonymously in 1816 when she was 19 years old. The novel served director James Whale as the model for the film Frankenstein in 1931. In this story, the effects of mystical traditions such as the golem and Homunculi may still be felt because the scientist described here, Victor Frankenstein, does not follow ambitions to construct a machine, but an organic creature, with which he hopes to find the elixir of life. Thus, he is less inspired by the builders of automatons than he is by Paracelsus and the early alchemists. For this reason he searches out components for his creature in morgues, dissecting rooms, slaughterhouses and even from graves, bringing the morbid tissue to life with the use of electricity, which was thought to harbor one of the secrets of life during his times. Frankenstein’s monster develops an independently minded personality and ultimately turns against its creator. This motif expresses the fear of a technology that has gotten out of control. 

In Fritz Lang’s legendary silent film work Metropolis the constructor imbues the machine monster Futura with the looks of the female worker Maria. The real Maria stands under the suspicion of stirring up the workers, is abducted and then replaced with a seemingly identical female robot who is to carry out the task of sowing discord among the workers from the lower part of town in order to prevent the threat of an uprising against the exploitative elite from the upper town. To take revenge against the manufacturing family, the inventor Rotwang on the other hand programs the machine with the aim of inciting the workers to revolt and destroy both the “heart machine” as well as the entire “upper town.” Of course, the swindle is exposed at the end and the robot woman is burned at the stake like a witch in medieval times. Fritz Lang mixes social and technological criticism as well as motifs from myths and fables to create a blend of futuristic vision and archaic past in which capital and labor are ultimately reconciled. The film made in 1926 impressively stages the figure of an android for the first time. The fact that this film was based on the novel Metropolis by Thea von Harbou has since fallen into oblivion.

Since 1938, the biochemist Isaac Asimov has been writing against the inflationary horror stories, formulating his famous Three Laws of Robotics according to which the brains of androids are to be programmed so that any sort of damage to humans is rendered impossible. Among his numerous short stories and novels, the I, Robot is one of the classics of science fiction literature, and was filmed in 2004 by Alex Proyas. In nine stories, Asimov makes a theme of the ethical questions in dealing with robots that are increasingly developing human skills to the point that it will no longer be possible to differentiate them from humans and in the future will even become the superior species. Asimov’s moral principles are no longer valid then in the doomsday scenario created by author Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968 achieved world-fame in the filming of Blade Runner by Ridley Scott. In this futuristic vision the creatures themselves no longer know whether they are humans or robots in the forms of replicas. The difference between nature and artifice has been leveled once and for all, and uncertainty prevails on both sides concerning one’s own identity.

In conclusion, there is one novel yet to be mentioned, which had been written in 1940 and must be considered as the visionary anticipation of virtual reality. In The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a refugee comes to an island he thinks is uninhabited because it is supposedly contaminated by a deadly germ. To his surprise he finds an abandoned museum there and unexpectedly comes across a group of summer guests strolling, dancing and bathing and from whom he hides until he notices that they ignore him, as if he did not exist. Strangely enough, the crowd suddenly disappears, only to show up again a short time later in order to repeat precisely the same actions and conversations. The mystery is solved when the refugee discovers a machine in the basement of the museum, the inventor Morel has used to reproduce his guests and himself for a week long using a photographic process in order to capture all of the events forever, including physicalness, consciousness, and sensual experience. Driven by the intervals of the tides, from this time on, the scene on the island is projected uniformly over and over again, as if it were on a record playing eternally non-stop. It is not possible to differentiate experienced reality from virtuality. The “pleasant eternity” the inventor promises his guests does have the unpleasant side effect of real death in the present; the machine that takes the pictures devours the bodies from the outside to the inside. The refugee is skeptical as to whether the images are actually able to think and feel and he wants to try out the machine. Before he turns on the recording machine and places himself before it in order to approach more closely a woman from the virtual group of people, he expresses the hope in his diary: “One’s thoughts or feelings during life – or while the machine is recording – will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience … Then life will be a repository for death.” These concluding words are full of promise after all.

Translated by Elizabeth Volk