| Its
sole function is to perform the act of walking in order to discharge
and redeem the futile wanderlust of Humanity.
Its gait is a crude parody of ours,it can only stumble blindly forward
or, in equal panic, retreat back into whatever it was trying to
flee from. Unhindered, though, it will keep on until its reserves
of power are exhausted.
It has no intelligence, constructs no model of the world for itself
to follow it just reacts to whatever it encounters by fleeing form
it or ignoring it.
Its purpose is to be futile, its baggage is a burden of significance.
The ReBabeliser is a further burden for the Stumbling
Machine to carry; it translates the motion of the Stumbling Machine
into an ursprache of its own devising - from the discarded remains
of many languages it reassembles speech in a language which is no
language but is the Root of every language.
As the Stumbling Machine's wanderings seek to redeem Humanity's
rootlessness, so the ReBabeliser tries to atone for Babel and the
Crime of Poetry.
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This was the first
of a number of Walking Machines; crude, ambulant sculptures, exhibiting
limited behaviours which are a mechanised parody of the simplest
elements of Artificial Intelligence. The ReBabeliser (1997/8 Hull
and London) had a recombinant sound generator operated by its own
motion - a record deck mounted on the machine played a disc of raw,
random syllables and every time the machine moved the tone arm would
skip, unpredictably, to another part of the record. The result occasionally
approached an uncanny concrete poetry...
The Vicious Rural Walking Machine (1999,
Grizedale Forest) crawled painfully through the woods and lashed
out at anyone approaching it.
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