AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

In 1939, technological innovator, Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974) wrote a memo noting his ideas for a machine that would revolutionise the interaction of readers with their libraries.

This electromechanical machine, the ‘Memex’ (a compound of memory and extension), would store the contents of thousands of volumes within a few cubic metres of desk-space.  Texts would be condensed into micro-photographic film records, which, at the press of a button or manoeuvre of a lever, could be viewed on screens, to “furnish a compressed time scale for a shrunken world”. Upon the typing of an index code, page images would be brought into view - a time-saving retrieval of information, and way of creating associations between texts. 

This process of association-making Bush described as the making of memory trails. These ‘trails’, Bush envisaged, would be analogous to the connections of neural pathways in the user’s mind, inscribing personal memory links between written material to support and improve “man’s processes of thought”, methods of classification, and the scientific record. Unlike links in human memory, the trails inscribed by the Memex would not fade over time, but act as mechanical traces to create novel associations for readers and enable the recall of information stored in physical media swiftly.

Bush’s imaginative engineering, contemporary to H. G. Wells’ utopic ideas for a ‘Permanent World Encylopedia’, was never brought into material existence. The Memex is not therefore a dead object. The ideas behind the machine, though, live on, having inspired early forms of the digital networks we rely on today. Hypertext inventor, Ted Nelson, and modern web architect Tim Berners-Lee, acknowledge the influence of Bush’s manifestos on their construction of internet models. A conceptual autopsy of the internet would reveal layers of code distantly derived from Bush’s foresight.

As readers now flick through multiple web pages, fielded from one hypertext link to the next, a course of trails is produced through the material they read. Today this process of trail creation is integrated into the make-up of the Web. It does not exist to improve our memory capacity, or enable us retrieve information instantaneously (Google does the latter for us). But when we harvest the links posted on blogs, or browse the del.icio.us links of others, we are able to share information collectively, and place our own digital bookmarks. 

As digital realms continue to evolve – to augment, complement and confuse contemporary society - so too do our systems of classification, information access and reading practice.

“Undoubtedly man will learn to make his aircraft fly faster... but what can he do to mechanically improve a book?”, Bush writes, in 1939. For this question, we are still in search of an answer. 


Hannah Gregory
Autopsies reading group participant



All quotes from Vannevar Bush, ‘Mechanization and the Record’, in Nyce J. M. and Kahn, P. (eds), From Memex to Hypertext, Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (Academic Press, 1991).

Sources:

Nielson J., Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet & Beyond (Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1995).

Link to Bush’s outline essay of his ideas in 1945, ‘As We May Think’ in Atlantic Monthly, which was also published in a condensed version in Life magazine.

A bout de souffle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard) first came out in cinemas in France on 16 March 1960. Members of the Autopsies Group will no doubt be turning to their copy with fresh eyes on the lookout for objects now absent from everyday life (Patricia's vinyl collection, the many tools of the trades of journalists and photographers, the operator controlled telephone system, etc. etc.) In the meantime, this clip from a French television programme broadcast on 25 March 1960 shows an interview with jazz pianist Martial Solal who performed the original music for the film. Solal explains he discovered jazz aged 15 when American troops arrived in Algiers in 1943, and jazz records began to be played on the radio, introducing the music of Art Tatum, Kenny Wilson and Benny Goodman. Inspired by the editing techniques of Godard's film, Solal says he found it easy to come up with the refrains to 'punctuate' the sequences.


Fifty years on, A bout de souffle looks, and sounds, a fresh as ever. 

While carrying out research into Paris transport networks I recently came across an image that seemed strangely familiar. Illustrating one of the many proposed transport projects for the Paris region during the 1960s was a photo of a suspended metro train. The project has now been completely forgotten and despite lengthy development and testing the technology was never adopted in France. And yet the suspended metro is known the world over for it is immortalised in François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451. In the film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel, the suspended metro appears in the daily commute between the city centre and the residential suburbs. On board, Clarisse notices her neighbour Montag, and the two establish a friendship on the daily commute to their respective jobs in the fire station and school.

Truffaut made the suspended metro sequences on a location shoot near Orléans in France. In 1959, engineering film SAFEGE built a 1370 metre track at Châteauneuf sur Loire to conduct tests for a new form of rapid and silent public transport. The project generated much interest from abroad but before the company could sell the technology it would first have to build a working system in France. When Truffaut's team arrived for filming at the test track in March 1966 development for the SAFEGE metro was at its height, and the system seemed likely to be rolled out imminently for commercial operations. At least two proposals were developed for the Parisian suburbs, but the first was rejected due to technical difficulties, and the second abandoned in October 1966 for financial reasons.

A few years later the test track was dismantled and the carriage was sold for scrap. By chance, however, the unit immortalised on film by Fahrenheit 451 escaped the smelter and after providing a home for the iron merchant's son it was used as a chicken hut. Discovered in a field in 1991, the carriage was bought by members of a local association (ARSATI) interested in the history of the Aérotrain - another experimental transport system developed near Orléans in the 1960s and 70s. After restoring the carriage in 1994, ARSATI planned to display the SAFEGE metro in a museum dedicated to innovative transport, but sadly the unique metro was vandalised and the project abandoned.

Truffaut wrote he was determined to use the suspended metro in his film, and remarked that even though it seemed out of date compared to the neighbouring high speed Aérotrain experiments it was still a glimpse into a future that otherwise pretty much resembled contemporary England. Over forty years after the release of Fahrenheit 451, the suspended metro of the film still seems strikingly modern - or at least timeless compared to the brick houses of Montag's street, resembling the London outer-suburban commuter belt of the 1960s, and the sea of rooftop television aerials in the title sequence. The film remains the last resting place of a transport system out of its time.


Jacob Paskins


References to the SAFEGE suspended metro from Le Métro Suspendu website (in French).