Kempelen at Mücsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest

From June 22 to September 2, 2007, Michael Markert’s interactive cybernetic talking machine “Kempelen 2.0” can be seen as part of the special exhibition “Mensch-[in der]-Maschine” at Mücsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest and later at the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Median in Karlsruhe. The exhibition was curated by Rita Kálmán, József Mélyi and Bernhard Serexhe. The book accompanying the exhibition was edited by Peter Weibel and others and was published by Matthes & Seitz in 2007.

The talking machine Kempelen 2 by Michael Markert is a contribution for Phonetic Kemp Inc., established in collaboration with Georg Winter.

»Starting with the chess automata, the joint exhibition of the Budapest C³ Foundation and the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe expands the image of the scientist, engineer, artist, showman, civil servant and private individual von Kempelens to include the mechanical inventions of his era.« (translated by DeepL) https://zkm.de/de/ausstellung/2007/06/wolfgang-von-kempelen-mensch-in-der-maschine

Kempelen’s chess automat was a revolution in its day, as Kempelen claimed that his Mechanical Turk could beat anyone at chess. It actually won in various demonstrations and the spectators were thrilled by the presentation of the new technological advances. However, the chess Turk was just a clever magic trick: there was little space inside the machine, but enough for a human, who controlled the movement of the automaton and its moves via a complex mechanism under the board. It is a popular assumption that the German word “türken” (to trick) acquired the connotation of a swindle from this very machine.

While Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 – 1804), an Austrian-Hungarian inventor, is mainly known today for his chess-playing Mechanical Turk, he also studied the human speech apparatus and published the first fundamental work entitled »Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst der Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine« in 1791 (Kempelen 1791). This talking machine is considered to be one of the first speech-producing machines. Using a bellows that simulates a lung, air can be pressed through a piece of rubber that can be adjusted by hand. With a little practice, this produces speech-like sounds.

The first ever talking machine (despite the fact that lure calls through the lungs, larynx and chest of dead cranes were used to hunt birds as early as the 13th century) was invented by Christian Kratzenstein in 1773. Around the same time, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen also began experimenting with imitating human speech. In contrast to the Mechanical Turk, von Kempelen’s last speech machine has survived to this day and can be found in the Department of Musical Instruments of the Deutsches Museum in Munich alongside several other speech-generating machines.

»The exhibition at the ZKM focuses on current artistic adaptations of the metaphors created by Kempelen’s apparatuses. The man-machine theme is reflected in the works of numerous contemporary artists. From the mechanical automata to the robots and high-performance computers of our present day, the exhibition accompanies the different variants of the chess automata since the 18th century. With their works, the twenty participating artists explore the theoretical implications and the continued impact of von Kempelen’s automata in the context of our time. In this way, they contribute to our understanding of today’s world and the issues that concern us.« (translated by DeepL) https://zkm.de/de/ausstellung/2007/06/wolfgang-von-kempelen-mensch-in-der-maschine

Kempelen 2.0 or kII is a voice topological interface for gestural navigation in phonetic space. The hand acts as speech organ during the enunciation of the speech process. It is operated by sensory determination of the open state of both hands, the position in space, the relative height and other parameters that are assigned to the position of the jaw and tongue in the oral cavity as well as pitch and rhythm. Phoneme production is based on phonetic laws. By implementing musical scales and speech rhythms, a phonetic language is created whose context of meaning is not developed through the transport of information but through the abstraction of the voice in linguistic and phonetic space.

Articulatory-topological phonetics deals with the speech process in which body parts function as speech organs – and thus ties in historically with Kempelen’s motif of speech production for the voiceless through voice production for the speechless.

»One of the most important points here is certainly whether the idea of an intelligent machine is not a contradiction in terms. The ideas of ‘artificial intelligence’, which replace humans with machines, set this questioning process in motion. If, as in Kempelen’s chess automata, there is always a human being in every machine, then this human being can also be destroyed by the excessive power of the machinery it sets in motion.« (translated by DeepL)
ZKM-Ausstellung Wolfgang von Kempelen – Mensch in der Maschine

The exhibition will be on show from March to May 2007 at the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle Budespest in Hungary and then from June to September 2007 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe in Germany.

Exhibitions

Publication / Exhibition Catalog

  • Bernhard Serexhe and Peter Weibel (eds) (2007) Wolfgang von Kempelen: Man-(in the)-Machine. Mensch-(in der)-Maschine. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
    ISBN 978-3-88221-997-5

Further Sources

Links

Participating Artists:

Ralf Baecker, Zoe Beloff, Péter Forgács, Ken Feingold, Herbert Kitzel, Severin Hofmann / David Moises, György Jovánovics, Gergely Kovács / Bence Samu, Gergely László und Péter Rákosi, Jürg Lehni / Stephan Krass, M+M, János Major, Katrin von Maltzahn, Daria Martin, John Miller / Frank Lutz, Gyula Pauer, Wolf Pehlke, Simon Penny, Martin Riches, robotlab, Alexei Shulgin, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák mit Róbert Langh, Márton Fernezelyi und Richard Aczel, Tamás Waliczky, Georg Winter und Michael Markert

Sponsors

Kulturstiftung des Bundes; Ungarischer Akzent; Oktatási és kulturális Minisztérium; Múcsarnok; Nemzeti Kulturális Alapprogram; Szerencsejáték Zrt.; di:’angewandte; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg; EnBW; Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg; Stadt Karlsruhe