Musical Lady and Repliee - Erotic Machine Sisters 200 Year Apart....

1776 - Musical Lady

If the Poet speaks truth that says Music has charms
Who can view this Fair Object without Love’s alarms
Yet beware ye fond Youths vain the Transports ye feel
Those Smiles but deceive you, her Heart’s made of steel
For tho’ pure as a Vestal her price may be found
And who will may have her for Five Thousand Pounds

So read the mischievous 1776 advertisement of Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1721-1790) and his son Henry-Louis (1753-1791) about their Musical Lady. She was a lovely young woman who played the clavichord “by the pressure of her own fingers upon the keys” (Bedini, 1964, p. 39). Jacquet-Droz was showing his most famous and successful musical automaton at the Great Promenade Room in Spring Gardens, London. Descriptions of Droz’s Musical Lady tended to focus upon her demure, yet erotic nature. Musical Lady was noted and reviewed in the press for her heaving breasts and her coquettish bow (in addition to her musical ability). “The accomplished lady’s eyes really moved… ‘She is apparently agitated’…with an anxiety and diffidence not always felt in real life” (Schaffer, 1996, p. 56). Such reviews highlight the interplay of passion and exoticism that has long been associated with the female-machine.

Fast forward 230 years and we encounter another mechanical woman name Repliee Q1, created in Japan by Hiroshi Ishiguro.

2005, Repliee Q1 - Hiroshu Ishiguro

A reporter encountering this android at the 2005 World Expo in Japan described her in the following way:

She gestured, blinked, spoke, and even appeared to breathe... the android is partially covered in skin like silicone. Q1 is powered by a nearby air compressor, and has 31 points of articulation in its upper body. Internal sensors allow the android to react “naturally.” It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it’s the little, “unconscious” movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans. (Chamberlain, 2005)

Discussion continues to focus upon the female-machines erotic potential. Indeed, as Simon Schaffer points out seduction has always been "an indispensable accompaniment of the trade in automata" (Schaffer, 1996, p. 56).

In recent books (David Levy's Love & Sex With Robots) and articles (Yoeman and Mars, Robots, Men and Sex Tourism) and even film (Lars and the Real Girl), scholars seem to push the erotic potential of the female machine to its unsurprising conclusion: robotic lovers. Yoeman and Mars imagine a future sex scene populated with android sex machines comprised, "of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features ... android prostitutes will be both aesthetically pleasing and able to provide guaranteed performance and stimulation."

Sources:
Bedini, S. (1964). The Role of Automata in the History of Technology. Technology and Culture, 5(1), p. 24.

Chamberlain, T. (2005). Photo in the News: Ultra-Life Robot Debuts in Japan Retrieved June 10, 2005, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0610_050610_robot.html

Levy, D. (2007). Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. New York: Harper Collins.

Schaffer, S. (1996). Babbage's dancer and the impresarios of mechanism. In F. Spufford & J. Uglow (Eds.), Cultural Babbage: technology, time, and invention, London: Faber and Faber, p. 56

Yeoman, Ian and Michelle Mars (May 2012). Robots Men and Sex Tourism. Futures Vol. 44: pp. 365-371.