The Marvellous Mechanical Musical Maiden is the marvel of the age—another age. She an automaton, with a limited range of pre-determined actions. She is forever straining against her bounded existence in a quest for true human connectivity.
Suspended in a sleeping state, our mechanical maiden moves forward through time, awakening at key staging points of the new century. Through haunting, melancholic songs she reports on the times she finds around her. She sings of misplaced expectations, hoped-for connections and abandoned love. Honey Can You Spare a Dime?
Despite moving through time, in her 1890s finery remains entirely of her era. Her’s is a fulsomely sumptuous costume, with a high lace collar, a multi-layered bustier, and protruding bustle with broad outlying paniers.
Lying concealed within her ample costuming, are the electronic wires and buttons that are the blood and marrow of her robotic existence. They innervate a range of limited but gracious gestures, that sparks-up the musical accompaniment to her songs. The notes flow out through speakers hidden within the outlying paniers.
How did this spare and yearning humanoid find herself in such a trap? Once, she was a fully-human street singer. For payment, she would sing beautiful songs to passers-by.
One fateful day, she allowed Thomas Edison to record her beautiful voice. In doing so, however, she lost forever her ownership over it. And, in the process, lost control over her own life.
She had lost her agency. Agency in this context is the ability to influence your own life and exercise a personal sense of responsibility. People with agency bring such capabilities to their capacity for inter-relationships.
Without her own human agency, she was an automaton—a machine with the appearance of a human. As if afflicted with encephalitis lethargica—an epidemic of the early decades of the 20th century—she remained locked, seemingly forever, in a slumped but upright position.
Over the years there were awakenings. Her L-Dopa came in the form of the divine passing of a "human spark”... She would then wake up and begin a limited connection with her “dear ones”. Eventually, the spark of life, like fading batteries, failed her.
Dusted off from a by-gone era, “dear ones” is the mechanical maiden’s wonderfully endearing form of personal address. Here, from the early decades of the 21st century, her term sounds like the entirely valid gender and relationship neutral form of address for so many have been grasping.
This automaton was once fully a woman, who lost her talents and capabilities to the leading proponent of an emerging technology. “Dear ones” is the maiden’s declaration that human inter-connectedness neutraliser technologically-driven dehumanisation. She’s experienced it all before.