Leonardo's dream

Ramiro Carrillo

In the autumn of 1769, a French conjurer named Pelletier arrived in Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to perform before the imperial court. Pelletier was a showman who had gained fame across Europe for performing mysterious “magnetic games,” illusions so astonishing that rumors spread of supernatural forces invoked by the magician. Empress Maria Theresa of Habsburg, an enlightened ruler and suspicious of superstition, decided to have someone in attendance who could expose a possible fraud. She summoned Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian engineer renowned for his knowledge of physics, mechanics, and hydraulics. The precise nature of Pelletier’s show is uncertain; what matters is that afterward, Kempelen assured the Empress he had seen nothing that could not be imitated—and indeed surpassed—by technological means. To prove it, he promised to build a machine that would make the magician’s wonders seem trivial.

The project did not take long: a few months later, Kempelen presented before the court an automaton capable of playing chess—a feat which, as a famous writer would later say, if true, would make it the most extraordinary invention in human history. According to accounts of the time, it was a large wooden cabinet with doors that could be opened to reveal complex clockwork inside. On its top rested a chessboard, and behind it stood a life-sized figure dressed in oriental robes and a turban, which earned it the name by which it would become known: The Turk. When activated, the automaton used its left arm to move the pieces; if its opponent made an illegal move, the figure tapped insistently on the table and shook its head from side to side until the situation was corrected. It was even said that when it threatened the opposing king, The Turk uttered the word “check.” Naturally, the invention caused a sensation. In 1776, the engineer and his creation embarked on a tour across the continent.

It seems The Turk won most of its matches, encouraging distinguished players to test their skill against the machine. In Paris it played against Benjamin Franklin—then serving as a diplomat—, in Berlin it had the honor of defeating Frederick the Great, and in Vienna it bested Napoleon Bonaparte three times. That was in 1809, years after Kempelen’s death. By then, a young Bavarian musician and mechanic named Johann Maelzel—the inventor of, among other devices, the metronome—had purchased The Turk from Kempelen’s heirs and embarked on a lucrative tour that eventually brought him to America. It lasted until Maelzel’s own death in 1838. I like to imagine, however, that The Turk’s end came some years earlier, one day when the skilled chess player hidden inside the cabinet realized he had grown too stout, became trapped among the gears, and his cries for help revealed to the astonished public that the automaton was not merely a machine. That was in Baltimore, in 1827.

From a modern perspective, it is surprising that anyone could have believed a contraption built with such primitive mechanical technology could do something as complex as play chess. And yet, at that time it seemed plausible. The eighteenth century was filled with automata of every kind: Jaquet-Droz’s Clavichord Player, John Joseph Merlin’s Dancing Lady, or Jacques de Vaucanson’s famous Mechanical Duck that “ate,” “digested,” and “defecated” grain. These were times that celebrated human science, the triumph of engineering and human inventiveness. Kempelen himself sought, through his machine, to demonstrate the superiority of science over supposed magic—creating an illusion, tricked but not deceitful, to certify the victory of human ingenuity over the supernatural. In fact, he never claimed that his automaton truly played chess. For him it was merely “a very ordinary mechanical device, a trifle whose effects seem so marvelous only because of the boldness of its conception and the methods used to create the illusion.” He never intended to deceive, but to construct a fiction—an artifice that defied superstition through the cleverness and wit that are the pure products of human intellect.

The story of Kempelen and The Turk is a beautiful image of humanity’s desire to free itself from the supernatural and claim autonomy over its destiny. Humanity, once aware of itself and humbled by nature’s vastness, had sought refuge in the magical; now it marveled at the power of science and mechanics to master the world. It perceived its ability to dominate nature through machinery. This fantasy of progress through technology lay behind the fascination modern man felt for clockwork, automata, inventions, and music boxes. For machines, born of science and ingenuity, amplify human action; they allow him to fell forests, tunnel mountains, build cities, divert rivers—one day, even to fly.

But Leonardo’s dream long ago turned into a nightmare, when progress revealed its other face and we discovered that the industrialization of goods also meant the industrialization of evils; that our dominion over the world magnified inequality, hunger, and war, the devastation of nature and its resources. Despite this alarming truth, today more than ever, the imagery surrounding us in Western society abounds with signs of triumph over nature: a bright, bountiful world that encourages us to believe we can control our lives through machines—phones, computers, cars—and even escape the marks of aging and death. Curiously, it is now, when we have come so far and learned so much—when we already know there is a man hidden inside the automaton—that we most clearly live immersed in illusion. But not the illusion of a machine that exposed its gears to prove its cleverness; rather, an illusion whose ever-more lifelike appearance tempts us to desire and to believe that the doll is truly a Turk playing chess. The technological dream has become a mirage.

In our time, Tahiche Díaz is a man who builds mechanisms.

Some of his sculptures display gears, wheels, and motors, moving by means of mechanics as simple as they are comprehensible. The rest are, in any case, contraptions—roly-polies, pendulums, optics, models, modules. His work always poses an engineering problem—one that demands ingenuity, knowledge, and experience to resolve. Indeed, Tahiche Díaz is a man devoted to experimenting, to understanding, to inventing—to opening himself to the world and grasping it through action, construction, and drawing. It is an attitude that follows, we might say, in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci—except that Leonardo imagined a world in which the unknown still found its final explanation in the supernatural, making his posture almost revolutionary. In contrast, maintaining such a commitment to knowledge in times like ours, when every mystery seems within human comprehension, is, if not anachronistic, at least rare.

Tahiche Díaz sustains that attitude, and I believe that in doing so he manages to comprehend—that is, to understand and encompass—the dimension of his own experience, binding his knowing and thinking to his observing and his making. The reality on which this man works—the ground and the goal of his labor—is a reality that is truly real: his approach to things, to their representation, and to the construction of his works invokes the dimension of the human. His acts and his works are experimentation, learning, engineering, machination; they shape not only a way of being in the world, but also a means of access to, and representation of, reality itself.

Perhaps that is why his sculptures so often take the form of models. In truth, both building machines and constructing models fit perfectly with the metaphor of the artist as creator: machines attempt to emulate organic bodies; models seek to reproduce the settings in which life unfolds.

To build a model is to grasp the world, to know it, in the sense Leonardo understood: to know reality by drawing it. To make as to know. Yet at the same time, the model is a game—it has something childlike about it. The model maker need not experience the world, only learn its dimensions and appearance to reproduce them to scale. In reducing the world’s complexity to a problem of formal construction, the model becomes an image unburdened by responsibility toward reality—a representation that demands no commitment to what it represents. In that sense, the model is an immature entertainment: it recreates the settings of life while disregarding the value of lived experience. The representation of reality as insignificant distraction.

No doubt there is something of the child in Tahiche Díaz when he builds models—when he longs to understand. Yet he is not particularly interested in reproducing the external form of things; his models do not depict the physical space where experience occurs—they are the echo of experience itself. Hence their difficulty, and their appeal. His works allude to the city as a stage for life—but to that city, as Italo Calvino wrote, “not made of its physical components, but of the relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.” Indeed, his sculptures are made of relationships; through them, he does not aim to reflect the material, but that which animates it.

For this reason, Tahiche Díaz has sought to recover something of the meaning architectural models held in certain cultures—such as ancient Egypt, where as part of funerary rites it was customary to build a model of the deceased’s home so that he might dwell there in the afterlife. There, the faithful recreation of physical dimensions was not the point; far more important was the purpose of the model: to keep the soul from being homeless, to give it a dwelling for all eternity. The model functioned as an extension of the body—if the body had been the soul’s dwelling in life, the model would be so in death.

Admittedly, this is a curious reference for these sculptures, and its mystical tone may seem at odds with the scientific discourse of his work. Yet one could say that Tahiche Díaz’s art speaks of the soul—both of that breath that animates our individual existence and of the myriad relationships that weave the fabric of the city, understood as the space of human dialogue. His works move between the dimension of individual experience and that of the social sphere. They are reflections on the space of lived experience—and that is why movement plays such a vital role in them. These sculptures—models—machines are images of motion as an index of life itself.

Thus, in works such as Cultivo sobre “El carro del Heno” he seeks to reflect forms of animation in individual existence—a breath that responds to needs, will, and desire, manifesting in movement born of anxiety, and whose depiction is therefore irregular. Yet as we broaden our field of view to a social space, we see how individual itineraries intersect and form currents, patterns, and rhythms. The iconic representation of social movement will show greater regularity; rhythms will emerge. A social space consists of countless intertwined motions, and its drawing will resemble the symphonic weave described in the work Ciudad-Pentagrama.

Just as movement is a sign and image of life, rhythm can be the image of experience lived within a social space. It is a sign of dialogue, of communication; the synthetic representation of political experience. And here, within the machinery of these sculptures, the evocation of the soul converges with the discourse on the personal—and political—act of knowing. For rhythmic motion, the representation of the heartbeat of social space, is also the resonance of the machines’ gears—those that bear witness to humanity’s dream of knowing and, through knowing, of attaining autonomy and responsibility.

That is why Tahiche Díaz’s sculptures are houses—houses of the soul—and why they are full of rhythm. Such is Habitáculo-Metrónomo, that fascinating roly-poly house whose title, by a wonderful coincidence, takes us back to Maelzel and his automaton. Tahiche Díaz makes trifles—using ingenuity, a bit of mechanics, and a few tricks—to create illusions, illusions that figure the restoration of our connection with experience, the recovery of knowing and making as the soul of humanity. His sculptures are trifles that modestly aspire to be only fictions—those kinds of fictions that make us more real.

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In April 1836, Edgar Allan Poe published Maelzel’s Chess Player, an essay reflecting on the chess-playing automaton. He deduced, though he had never seen it, that a man must necessarily be operating the mechanism from within; the only question was how.

Poe concluded, then, that The Turk was, without doubt, a trick.

Without doubt, a beautiful trick.