It is an example of a contemporary fascination with cyborgs and with the increasingly blurred dividing line between machine and organism. This article takes up the notion of mechanism that is implicit in the very word automatism. The impulse to become a machine is something that shall be examined with respect to the surrealist practice of automatic writing and drawing before turning to some contemporary instances. The latter-day instantiations of automatic techniques that will be discussed hark back to surrealism, prompting us to reflect upon and question what was at stake in their use of the technique.
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, recording instruments became vital tools in the production of scientific knowledge in a range of disciplines that were of direct relevance to surrealism. Such mechanical apparatuses, synonymous with the values of precision and objectivity, quickly became the benchmark of an experimental method. The inexorable rise of the graphic method has been intensively studied by historians of science and visual culture, but surrealism has not yet been considered as partaking of this transformation in the field of visual representation.
The graphic method inaugurated a novel paradigm of visual representation, one geared towards capturing dynamic phenomena in their essence. It was the product of a radically new scientific conception of the physical universe in terms of dynamic forces, a world view that is doubtless at some level a naturalisation of the energies, both destructive and creative, unleashed by industrial capitalism.
It was not simply a technology for making visible something that lay beneath the human perceptual threshold like a microscope , but rather a technology for producing a visual analogue β a translation β of forces and phenomena that do not themselves belong to a visual order of things. An electrical stimulus causes the muscle to contract, deflecting the stylus and thus producing on the revolving drum a typical white on black curvilinear trace.
Fatigue of the muscle produces an increased duration and diminished amplitude of successive contractions, as shown in the figure at the bottom. A more sophisticated device pictured by Marey consisted of a flexible diaphragm, a sort of primitive transducer, connected by a hollow rubber tube to a stylus, which inscribed onto a continuous strip of paper.
