In the mid 1990s, as I was investigating the history of science and technology, I noticed that certain themes kept recurring in different historical epochs. While the themes manifested differently and made differing claims for technology and knowledge, they had many of the same goals. For example, reading faces has been an ongoing endeavor, from cranioscopy through Darwin to Amazon’s Rekognition. There has also been an ongoing tradition of experiments to determine the nature of language, dating back to Herodotus, and carried on through countless inquiries such as those by von Kempelen, Dudley, and, of course, Amazon’s Alexa.

My method for investigating these pan-historical human desires was borrowed from literary historical fiction: I would create, de novo, fictional experiments that could nonetheless present as credible entries in the history of technology, describing a moment in the past while also revealing something about the contemporary efforts, and also challenging viewers to think about this history. The work was presented “dry” and without reference to its fictional or synthetic nature; indeed the projects were accepted as factual by many viewers, appeared in online histories of technology, and one was even mistakenly curated by a historical museum until I realized their error and alerted them.