Like sculptures, robots have traditionally been hard-bodied: from Robot B-9 in Lost in Space to the automated welders on today’s factory floors, robots are steel-clad helpmates. Their glistening frames are durable, but there are drawbacks: metal parts are heavy and take a good deal of energy to move; it is also hard for metal robots to lift and grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Otherlab is a company experimenting with soft robotics. In place of metals, they use lightweight and inexpensive fabric. The company’s inflatable robots are much lighter than conventional models and use less battery power – yet their Ant-roach robot can walk and support more than ten times its weight. Soft robotics has opened up a host of new possibilities: researchers have built squishy robots that can wiggle and crawl like earthworms and caterpillars, enabling them to navigate terrain that would trip up or trap a metal robot; the delicate grasp of other soft robots enables them to handle fresh eggs and living tissue, which would be crushed by a metal grip.
Otherlab’s Ant-roach robot
Brains constantly play variations on a theme, and that includes our experience of time. The Keystone Cops used fast motion to exaggerate their cinematic pratfalls. The movie Bonnie and Clyde used slow motion to make a balletic death scene as the criminals were being mowed down in a hailstorm of police bullets. The film 300 alternates fast and slow motion to violate temporal predictions in the battle sequences: the warriors hurtle at each other in surprising ways.
The same bend of speed can be used in technology. The continuous flow heart didn’t work perfectly at first, for an unexpected reason: just as eddies form in a flowing stream, clots tend to form where blood flow takes a sharp turn, raising the risk of stroke. After experimenting with different solutions, Frazier and Cohn discovered that modulating the flow speed prevented the blood clots from forming. By programming the pulseless heart to subtly speed up and slow down, they fought back against a potentially lethal problem. In 300, modulating the speed exaggerates the violence; used in the heart, the same bend sustains the breath of life.
And there are other ways to bend time. It usually flows forwards, but not in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. The play tells of a love triangle: Robert’s wife Emma is having an affair with his best friend, Jerry. But Pinter reverses the chronology. The play begins after the affair has ended, when Emma and Jerry meet after several years apart. Over the course of the play’s two hours, the narrative rewinds to the night when, years earlier, Jerry first declared his love for Emma. Each step back in time reveals earlier plans, promises, and reassurances that never materialize. By the time we listen to the characters in the final scene, very little they say to each other feels trustworthy. Pinter has inverted an arrow we normally take for granted, laying bare the roots of a marriage’s destruction.
Brains don’t only rewind time in the theater, but also in the lab. During the Second World War, the Swiss physicist Ernst Stueckelberg realized that he could describe the behavior of a positron (a particle of antimatter) as an electron running backward in time. Although it defies our lived experience, the reversal of time unmasked a new way to understand the sub-atomic world.
In the same vein, scientists are pursuing the goal of cloning a Neanderthal by reversing the arrow of time. Neanderthals were our close genetic cousins, differing from us in about one in ten genes. They too used tools, buried their dead and built fires. Although they were bigger and stronger than us, our own ancestors vanquished them: the last Neanderthals were wiped out about 35,000–50,000 years ago. Harvard biologist George Church has proposed reverse engineering a Neanderthal by beginning with a modern human genome and working backwards. Just as Pinter reversed chronology on the stage, biologists would rewind human evolution to create a Neanderthal stem cell, which could then be implanted in the womb of a compatible female host. Church’s idea is still speculative – but it is another example of the brain manipulating the flow of time to create new outcomes.
Some creative bends are intense; others are more minor. In the 1960s, artist Roy Lichtenstein paid homage to Monet’s cathedral paintings. His silk-screened images are grainier and more monochromatic, but the tribute to Monet is readily apparent.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral, Set 5
Similarly, in visual caricatures, signature features are exaggerated for comic effect – but not so much that we cannot tell who it is.
But when the distortions are more extreme, sources can be obscured. It is not easy to tell that the two paintings by Monet (next page) are of the same subject: the Japanese bridge at his home in Giverny.
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Footbridge
The Japanese Footbridge
And in Francis Bacon’s portraits, faces are blurred and mangled, the jumble of features fully disguising their subjects’ identities.
Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-portrait)
The capacity to bend a source beyond recognition solved a problem at the birth of the television age. As televisions became fixtures of American homes in the 1950s, broadcasters wanted people to pay for watching shows. But this was long before cable television, and there was no way to get the programming directly to a specific home; networks had no choice but to beam their paid programming in all directions in the air. How could companies get viewers to pay for something that could be latched onto by every antenna? The solution: engineers devised ways to scramble the signal, something like what Bacon had done to his face. In one encryption system, the analog lines were shuffled. In another, a randomized delay was added to each line, making them unsynchronized. To watch first-run movies or premium sports matches, subscribers to Paramount’s Telemeter “Pay-to-See” system dropped coins into a box, while clients of the Subscribervision service inserted a punch card.2 For the paying customer, a decoder box would unscramble the signal; for everyone else, it was bent into an unwatchable blur. For Bacon, twisting the image gave his portraits psychological depth; for television broadcasters, it protected their bottom line.
THE END OF TIME ILLUSION
Many of us fall prey to the “end of time” illusion, in which we convince ourselves that everything that can be done has already been done. But the history of bending tells a different story: there is always infinitely more to squeeze out. Human culture is forever a work in progress.
Consider knives. The oldest stone blades, with chips or a sharpened edge, date from approximately two million years ago.
Gradually, our ancestors molded the knife into a longer edge and handle, which allowed for greater force to be applied. From those humble beginnings, knives have been bent into countless forms, their family tree thick and endlessly branching. Consider that these diverse knives from nineteenth-century Phillipines are a collection from a single culture and time period.
Likewise, umbrellas and parasols have existed since ancient times. Early Egyptians made theirs out of palm leaves or