This latest video to make the rounds is an amazing collision of our current adolescent obsession with (and consumer colonization by) LEGO, and the late-modern materialists projection of a kind of 'scientism' (and the Enlightenment myth) into the furthest reaches of the past. What does that mean? "Hey, here is what appears to be a complex machine from the second century BC! That must mean that they dug gadgets and accuracy, and technology just like we do!"
Notice the use of terms like 'computer', and 'true purpose'.
This is a slippery terrain, and one that will take more meditation that one simple post, so I will use this as the first post in a new category: Saving the Appearances.
Much of my work is motivated by trying to resolve certain cultural, technological, and ethical contradictions that seem to come to a head with art in an age of mechanical reproducibility, and specifically in the craft of cinema. And 'rescuing' ancient complex tools from 21st century geekdom by returning them to their place in a more poetic 'interface' with the ancients, their world and the cosmos is a part of that project.
To even reduce, no less awkwardly equate, the Antikythra mechanism with a 'computer', and thus the ancient Greek world with our own pot-industrial, is a lingering vestige of Enlightenment audacity. It is this same audacity that was responsible for murdering God, taking human beings out of the Earth and satisfying our scopophilic perversion by putting us over all the Earth.
To use a tool and to be transformed by the use of a tool are two radically different and problematic distinctions. Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, and Lewis Mumford attempted to bring this distinction to light in the twentieth century and I believe that the current state of Christian theology of the arts (at least any contemplation worth its weight) is beginning to see its importance today.
The fact that Antikythera could accurately calculate eclipses does not tell us that the ancient Greeks were geeky about accuracy and gadgets, but that eclipses were central to their way of life. The stars mattered and paying attention to them told the ancient Greeks something truthful about who they were and what it means to be a human being ...
time is certainly out of joint