Texts Over Time
Digital Dolls : Reciting Scripture in the Robot's Body View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session S Brent Rodriguez Plate
We humans fear the machines will take over. They drive our cars, make our food, and take our jobs. They're also increasingly giving us our sacred texts. An android named Mindar has been reciting the Heart Sutra in a Zen Buddhist Temple in Kyoto. On the outskirts of Beijing, in the Buddhist Longquan temple, a small robot named Xian'er dispenses wisdom for enquiring minds. And SanTO (abbreviation for Sanctified Theomorphic Operator) quotes Bible verses to provide comfort for elderly people, while a south Asian company recently revealed a robotic arm that could perform puja. My paper notes several of the current ways robots and texts are merging, but I work to fill in a historical background of the use of dolls (including androids, automatons, and robots) in religious services, and ways they have been reciting sacred texts and prayers for millennia. From Albertus Magnus's 12th century android to the 16th century Spanish "Automaton of a Friar" to Thomas Edison's 19th century praying dolls, the recitation of prayers and texts has long been an aim for religious technologists. Ultimately, technology is our divine breath, the animating, ensouling force of Homo sapiens, and dolls are vital technological tools that find their way into our rituals, personal devotional lives, workplaces, and social spaces. By looking to our evolutionary past, and the ways our tools have made us who we are, we can come to the digital present and future with new understanding about the machines, and our own cyborgian selves.
The Transcended Texts: Giving Wings to Words (in Captivity) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anne Lamont
This paper focuses on the texts that Arvo Pärt uses in his compositions. The texts travel from the tradition of the Orthodox Church to the concert hall, the filming theatre and even to aid those in the process of dying. These traveling texts transcend the confinement of the manuscript paper to open up a world where sound and text free the listener. The true meaning of the text is realised in a transcended form because it is heard in combination with music. Through the tintinnabuli technique of composition invented by Pärt the subordinate music strives the clarification of the text. The focus is mainly on the De Profunids, a string of Psalm 130 and The Deer's Cry, a composition on the Lorica by St Patrick.
