Mechanical Muse Redux

By: Matthew Battles
June 14, 2010

I think I’ve reached my iPad tipping point:

The USB Typewriter is an arduously/elegantly-mashed-up hybrid of postmodern consumer electronics and the haunted machinery of Henry James, William S. Burroughs, and Paul Auster. You can order a custom model or get the kit via Etsy.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite unrealized schemes: to acquire a couple of industrial robots and program them to run a letterpress and bindery. The ebook, only in reverse! Which prompts a question: if a technologically-augmented human is a cyborg, what is a hybrid of two radically different technologies? A mechborg?

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cyborg, technology, typewriter, writing

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Mechanical Muse Redux

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