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This is the 2012 prototype of the Legged Squad Support System, commonly shortened to LS3, a robotic ‘pack mule’ designed to lighten the load of Marine field units. The LS3 is a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the robotics firm Boston Dynamics, which was purchased by Google in 2013. The machine can carry 400 pounds of gear for a distance of 20 miles before needing to be refueled. It receives real-time GPS instructions, and generates its own optical and locative data to make autonomous navigation decisions. The LS3 has “vision” and “hearing” technologies, and soldiers can speak their commands to it. In one of DARPA’s official press releases, dated Feb. 7th, 2012, Army Lt. Col. Joe Hitt, the program manager, said, “LS3 seeks to have the responsiveness of a trained animal and the carrying capacity of a mule.” Mules and donkeys are still employed by the United States military: the animals and their handlers practice at the Mountain Warfare Training Center in eastern California, and have been recently deployed to transport material and weapons in remote, mountainous locations. In fact, as sturdy and reliable pack animals, refined by many generations of breeding programs, donkeys have a long history of military service, typically hauling supplies and carrying wounded troops. At the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany, which re-opened to the public in October, 2011, this is contextualized within a wider history of service animals in a life-sized diorama display. This suite of taxidermied creatures also includes elephants, rescue dogs, and the camera-strapped pigeons that were used for surveillance imaging in the First World War. In recent years, precisely while American weapons contractors have been urgently working to engineer a new robotic surrogate, common laboring donkeys in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have found themselves forcibly weaponized within these countries’ various asymmetric battle spaces. In the confrontations

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with advanced foreign militaries, many pack animals have been surreptitiously strapped with improvised explosives and sent calmly walking towards unassuming targets, which have included NATO troops, Afghan police forces, and British encampments. A donkey’s camouflage in this situation is its ubiquity, and the presumption that any pack animal would be bearing a large, heavily wrapped cargo. Donkey carts were used as mobile rocket-launching platforms in Baghdad as early as 2003, but seemingly the first successful strike made with a donkey-borne Improvised Explosive Device was in October of 2008, in Kandahar, where one officer was killed. Similar incidents were then reported through 2013. While this kind of explosive delivery via animal is rarely an image-able phenomenon, this murky video sequence is purportedly footage of an exploding donkey cart at an Israeli Defense Force checkpoint in the Palestinian territories in January, 2001. No outside confirmation of this event has been found; but even if it is fake, it clearly illustrates a very real condition.

The artificial animatronic bird known as the SmartBird was designed by the bionics research laboratory at Festo, a German industrial manufacturer that specializes in lightweight materials and advanced pneumatics. It was publicly débuted in April of 2011, at the Hannover Technology Fair. It is an autonomously flying ornithopter, whose wing motions have been precisely engineered to mimic the patterned, responsive movements of a seagull. Made from extruded polyurethane and carbon fiber, the SmartBird is a model of lightweight engineering and energy efficiency. Its innovations could lead to a variety of commercial applications, including new kinds of power generators, or motors for automated production lines. Notably, Festo’s initial laboratory investigations for the SmartBird

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were modeled on the pioneering biological research of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), who had devised complex photographic devices to analyze the movements of birds that were flying on fixed circular tracks. Festo began by recreating this, developing a tethered flight path that slowed the birds down for more detailed observation. This data helped determine the SmartBird’s precision wing motions, and its electro-mechanical design. Festo claims that the bird is a “technology-bearer”: an invention heralding the arrival of future inventions. It is both a technical prototype and a clever advertisement for the company’s wider engineering services. But while Festo’s literature describes the SmartBird within the historic (and noble) project of deciphering natural flight, the machine has been shadowed from its beginning by an implied connection to surveillance—and weaponry—due to its uncanny capacity for camouflage. For example: In late August, 2011, some five months after the SmartBird’s public début, a surveillance drone crashed in Balochistan, in the southwest region of Pakistan, very near the Afghanistan border. Its wings had been modified, and shaped to look more like a bird’s. Amateur military enthusiasts have guessed at its true identity; among the more plausible is that it was an altered Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk, a surveillance drone which had been officially retired by the United States Air Force in 2007. Geo-TV, in Karachi, covered the official government response to this downed aircraft, and as part of that story, cut abruptly to Festo’s own footage of the flying SmartBird. “From now onwards, we will have to watch the skies carefully, to check whether a bird is real or if it is a spy,” said the reporter’s Urdu voice-over. (You can see this Geo-TV story here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsdCARsAl2k) To the Festo corporation, this spurious connection only exaggerated an unfortunate drone-related hysteria surrounding the SmartBird. But in context, such a dire speculation hardly seems

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unwarranted. August of 2011 was squarely within the furious American drone campaign in Pakistan, which had by then killed some 2,700 people, and no presumption about the American military’s technological imaginary would have seemed impossible. A strike on August 16th in North Waziristan had just killed six people; some three weeks later, on September 11, 2011, another strike would kill five more in the same province.

This is one of only a handful of surviving sketches from Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio), an Italian animated film directed by Raoul Verdini and Umberto Spano, based upon Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel by the same name. Here, the eponymous puppet-boy dances in an articulated staccato rhythm, prototyping the animation. This version of the Pinocchio legend was undertaken in 1935. It was to be the first animated feature of the Cartoni Animati Italiani Roma (CAIR) production company, chartered by Alfredo Rocco, a law professor and proto-fascist, who later died that same year. Due to lack of funding, work on the film ended prematurely in 1936. Walt Disney obtained the rights to the story shortly thereafter (along with, it is rumored, the sole remaining copy of the unfinished piece), and began work on his own version of the Pinocchio story in 1938. It was released two years later. Disney’s Pinocchio is now understood to have been a high water mark of the company’s animation. Its naturalism and complex aesthetics speak to the successful efforts of a large staff undertaking adventurous and exploratory techniques. The film used groundbreaking background effects, including live-action filming as a basis for the drawings, multiply-traced animation cels, and intricately detailed object maquettes. At this same time (and partly to support the similarly complex development of Bambi), Disney had even arranged for a small

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zoo to be kept on site: animators could study the movements and mechanics of rabbits, ducks, owls, and deer up close, while outside artists with specialty training in animal renderings gave visiting lectures. While Pinocchio was a spectacular technical success, the war had drastically reduced the foreign market for Disney films, and it became a financial disaster. Unable to afford the standard bonuses for his staff, Disney was forced to make salary cuts and layoffs, resulting in tremendous labor unrest and a contentious, bitter strike by the animators in May, 1941. Many, unsurprisingly, found gleeful ciphers for their political plight in the characters they drew professionally. Few of the strikers were active members of the Communist party, but Walt Disney’s retaliation tactics prompted many to join the Screen Cartoonists Guild. Despite ultimately winning concessions from the company with the help of federal mediators, the Guild’s victory couldn’t prevent an almost fifty percent reduction in the studio’s workforce; and many prominent animators decided to leave anyways, having been publicly denounced as Bolsheviks. Anti-communist hysteria was then on the rise on Hollywood. In 1944, Disney himself helped co-found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a conservative right-wing pressure group of Hollywood executives and actors, and he helped agitate for (and later fed potential witnesses to) the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. In the wake of the Disney strike, some notable cartoonists like Art Babbitt and David Hilberman went on to found a new animation shop called United Productions of America Studios. UPA introduced a new, simplified drawing technique, often called Limited Animation, which abandoned the realism of Disney cartoons and took its abstract stylistic cues from animated Soviet films and the willful two-dimensionality of modern art. In 1952, the UPA animator John Hubley was called before

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the HUAC committee but refused to name names; he was soon blacklisted from Hollywood work, along with several other UPA animators. The illustration seen here comes from the 1947 book In Henry’s Backyard, an adaptation of the UPA animated short Brotherhood of Man (1946), an educational film promoting racial equality. Funded by the United Auto Workers union, Brotherhood was based upon the 1943 pamphlet Races of Mankind by the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish. In 1953, Weltfish herself was brought before the HUAC committee, suspected of communist activities. Senator Joseph McCarthy used excerpts from the Races of Mankind pamphlet as evidence of her allegedly subversive work. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had been living in Los Angeles during the war (along with a group of fellow German exiles), was also called to appear before the HUAC hearings, and he finally testified on October 30th, 1947 after initially refusing. Shrewdly evading the bullying senators, Brecht claimed to have never been a member of the Communist Party, and made continual references to the disservice being done to his words by the Committee’s own German translator, who was sitting right near to him. He was politely thanked for his participation, and excused. (Describing his testimony in a letter to his friend Hanns Eisler, Brecht said, “… I simply had to obey my six lawyers, who advised me to tell the truth and nothing else.”) But Brecht’s decision to testify led to criticism from his colleagues; even accusations of betrayal. He left the United States permanently the next day. Over the following two years, then re-settled in East Germany, Brecht wrote the play The Days of the Commune, which imagined the tense weeks of the famed Parisian insurrection of 1871; it was an adaptation of The Defeat, by the Norwegian playwright Nordahl Grieg, whom Brecht had known. Grieg, serving as a foreign correspondent for the Norwegian government in exile, had been killed in 1943 while covering an air raid over Berlin. Brecht’s

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version of his Commune story was only finally produced in 1956, after Brecht’s own death earlier that year, by his company, The Berliner Ensemble in Chemnitz.

This caricature of the painter Gustave Courbet rejecting the Légion d’honneur was drawn by André Gill in 1870, one year before Courbet’s deep political involvement with the Paris Commune, and his visionary argument to dismantle the Vendôme Column in an arch gesture of anti-militarism. Courbet was an artist and a revolutionary, but not a revolutionary artist. Historian Charles Bouleau, in The Painter’s Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art (1963), reiterates how Courbet’s innovations were in content, but not form:

But in all that there were no really new discoveries in form. And, strangely enough, those who aimed at novelty and who really did modify the technique of painting, its language—or silence—and its effect upon our eyes, our spirit and our sensibility, these moderns, these innovators, for a long time did nothing to transform composition. It was precisely in this field that the studio routines, perhaps because they had become almost unconscious, proved most tenacious. The rotation (or ‘rabatment’) of the sides of the rectangle turns up yet again in the work of Delacroix, and more frequently in the works of his last period. In fact, Gros and Géricault went back to the classical painters, Delacroix to the Baroque, and even Courbet brought to this particular field of research less originality than is supposed. The Burial at Ornans is, like The Coronation, a collective portrait composed upon the verticals; Courbet may even have been conscious of the resemblance. The Artist’s Atelier is symmetrically counterpoised, and this arrangement is no new one. The artists of that time felt a real

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distaste for composition and the attitude of the Impressionists towards landscape painting is already present in Courbet’s famous joke: ‘When Jérome stops, I paint a landscape.’ Jérome was his donkey.

The brief seizing of Paris by the Communards was one of the first urban traumas in France to be ‘covered’ by photographic journalism. The deaf Parisian photographer Bruno Braquehais, forty-eight years old and up until then specializing in studio nudes, made some of the most significant documentary images during these weeks, focusing on the participants and the built landscapes of urban rebellion. In this image, we see the felling machinery attached to the Vendôme Column. Braquehais’s photographs were published after the Commune was crushed, and the police used his images to identify and track down former Communards: making this also one of the earliest instances of photography being used for social surveillance and law enforcement. The toppling of the Vendôme Column left a deep visual mark on the French psyche. In this humorous postcard, undated but likely from 1914, the Column itself reacts to the supposed news of a German victory in the Greenland forests, which sends it into wobbling shock, threatening to come unbolted a second time. Of course, here it is deformed by photographic trickery and early special effects. Photographer Ernest Louis Desire Le Deley, a popular Parisian publisher of heliotype postcards, had employed this distorting multiple-printing technique across a folio of satirical images, wherein various Paris monuments—the July Column, the Eiffel Tower, and others—all wobble and curl in apprehension at announcements of pompous German militarism. By simulating movement within a single image, and by making rubbery and articulated what we know to be concrete, and with its cartoonish and hysterical approach to collapse and disaster, this postcard enacts all the root gestures of animation, which was then only beginning to come into being.

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