In Collaboration with Renee Rhodes
Popularly labeled the world’s first computer, Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engine” was designed in Great Britain in the 1830s. The machine, redesigned as the “Analytic Engine” for which Ada Lovelace famously wrote some of the world’s first “code,” was envisioned by Babbage but wasn’t built until the 21st century, remaining for one hundred and seventy years, a “virtual” machine, a part of media folklore. This video approaches the machine as an assemblage, not a functional calculating device, but the cumulation of the imaginative efforts of inventors, engineers, and artists over a period of time. Layering images of its various incarnations, from schematics to constructed machine, and finally as a series of creatively interpreted movements developed and performed by artist Renee Rhodes, the video represents the mythic machine as a series of interwoven fragments offering only partial, speculative peeks at the historical machine.
