Imaginary machine catalogue

power-to-weight ratio, efficient enough to carry very little fuel. He probably knew this, but the need to research was compulsive. Was Leonardo influenced by the pump-screw of Archimedes (another polymath) or the wing nuts of the maple tree? Or the myth of Daedalus – those wings?)

Leonardo, flying machine drawings: relatable as the mythical inventor, ca. 1488 – 1493 trapped in the labyrinth of his friend, King Minos, might have mirrored the Machiavellian pressures of the leaders Leonardo worked for (during this period: Sforzas and Borgias)? In the annals of his ideas, file these after geological engineering (land reclamation) but before anatomy’s gravity.

In the dusty studio, easy to conjure: wood, weights, wax, cartoons for official commissions that would never be completed.

17. Oculist witnesses (Oculist charts) The last thing our understanding of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons should be is contingent on coherence. In failing to portray their subject wholly, they instead generate diabolical dynamism of shifting positions, unraveling the individual will that spelled the hallmark of the age. This is illustrated by considering their metaphysical opposite in drawings made some thirty years later: Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” prison, a utilitarian vision of rehabilitation through observation. Where Piranesi’s vision is pessimistic unto obscurantism, Bentham’s optimism is conducive to lucid centrality. Critically, both works revolve around notions of prisoners regimented by an absent presence.

The Panopticon (meaning “all seeing”) was based on a “central inspection principle,” (17) the prison envisaged as a circle of cells arranged around an inspection tower. From this hub, the prison’s inspector could look into the cells any time, addressing any inmate via complex networks of conversation tubes. Inmates would never see the inspector nor know if he was watching, ideally internalizing a conscience shaped by countenancing omniscient surveillance —