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September 14, 2004
Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture
| Title | Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture | |
| Author | Paul Shepheard | |
| Publisher | MIT Press | |
| Date | June 2003 | |
| ISBN | 0-262-69194-9 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| In this unruly, genre-busting, self-styled "club sandwich" of a book, memoir, polemic and meditation merge in the service of a quite simple premise: that architecture includes jetliners, Cadillacs, landscapes, and all other expressions of human "artifice", and that technology, the product of human ingenuity, is itself "a force of nature." It's a straightforward argument, but British architect and writer Shepheard pursues his point throught layers of lyricism and paeans of poetry. Yet the effect is not, as it could easily have been, annoying or cloying, but celebratory, optimistic and even, in places, visionary. Shepheard's account is fueleld by a noble purpose: to reclaim the machine as a human artifact, relating to human emotion, dreams and purposes. Freed from its fearful alter ego role as an alienating other in possession of non-human perfection, any machine, however complex, can be seen as a purely human production, and an object of love, existing in an exquisitely complex network of motivations and relationships. The machine, as Shepheard sees it, is not standing outside, or above or below the phenomenon we call civilisation, but is instead woven into the fabric of human culture: "We make the machines, we are their programs. I find myself speculating again on the peculiar state of anonymity we call celebrity - those strangers we know - and the inflation of our tribal observances into global events. We watch each other all the time on our machines. We make the machines, so we are their programs, and in using them we are watching ourselves. Machines 'r' us!" | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM