voi Ceshistorical balancing act on a bridge spanning twelve centuries, and deliberately link the
period of art before the media and the period of art after the media.
a programmable mechanical heartThe geographical and political hot spot of learning and knowledge during the golden
age of arabic- islamic science was the house of Wisdom in ninth- century Baghdad.
its founder Caliph al- ma’mun (786–833), who reigned for twenty years, provided for
the translation of Classical greek texts on (natural) philosophy into arabic, thus also
ensuring the survival of these core texts for the european Renaissance, and encouraged
young men with enquiring and creative minds to think independently and to approach
the world through experiment (Farmer 1931; zielinski and Fürlus. 2010).
in addition to many others, this profited the three brothers muhammad, ahmad, and
al- hasan, sons of musa bin shakir, whose smallest possible cooperative encompassed
an entire universe of scientific qualifications: mathematics and geometry, astronomy,
natural philosophy and medicine, music, and the art of engineering. The brothers have
gone down in the history of science and technology as the Banu musa. They employed
multitudes of translators who translated the texts of the great constructor of automata,
heron of alexandria, amongst others, from greek into arabic. ahmad is considered
to be the greatest engineer of the three princes. he is thought to be the main author
of their brilliant work Kitab al- Hiyal (Book of ingenious devices) from the mid- ninth
century.^5 The book is a compendium filled with sketches and exact instructions
for building around one hundred models (shakl); a variety of artefacts, devices and
their components, kinetic sculptures and automata, the latter in the direct sense of
devices that move of their own accord: filling devices and drinking devices operated
hydraulically and mechanically, animals driven by pneumatics that make noises, oil
lamps that not only fill up automatically, but also have self- adjusting draught shields so
that the flame remained protected and burnt eternally.^6
That things can be perpetually in motion, incessantly, was evidently very important
to the Banu musa. one of their masterpieces exhibits this characteristic; it is not
included in the surviving copies of the Book of Ingenious Devices, but experts in the
history of the arabic- islamic sciences attribute the device to prince ahmad. a
manuscript containing a description of this device was discovered by henry george
Farmer in the library of the ‘Three moons College’ of the greek orthodox Church in
Beirut, syria. The manuscript is singular. it describes a continuously playing flautist.
‘The instrument, which plays by itself (Al- alat illati tuzammir binafsiha)’ is the name
the Banu musa gave their device, thus underlining its character as an automaton. The
title evidences that they ascribed universal meaning to their technology; apparently,
they wanted their invention to be understood independently of any specific form of its
realization, such as the flute player.
an essential criterion for whether research has actually been accomplished is if the
protagonists succeed in making some new fact or aspect of the world accessible for
others. Birds and flute- players, powered by water and moved by pneumatics, are known
in ancient Chinese literature as well as in classical greek authors such as archimedes,
apollonius the geometer and carpenter, and the alexandrian heron. With regard to the
mechanisms, the technologically most advanced solutions are attributed to apollonius.