Meanwhile, the ability to decode and manipulate our genetic instructions or to alter our individual personalities with drugs raises questions about personal identity, about boundaries between living things and mechanistic machines, about freedom of action versus predetermined behavior.
Recalling Lloyd's and the Pompidou before it, the Cheesegrater's building-as-machine ethos is celebrated everywhere you look, with each component exposed and painted in jovial colours – just like the cogs of Stirk's transparent watch.
America is absolutely mechanistic, all machines and smokestacks, and the machines have electrical cords that extend underground.
His mechanistic imagery (machine parts rendered to vaguely erotic or sinister effect) and typography still dazzle, and his caprices, such as, from 1919, a picture frame that holds only a few strands of yarn, attached to slips of paper bearing droll words can seem to exhaust, before the letter, the repertoires of nineteen-seventies Conceptual artists.
The latest example is "Rocket City Rednecks" on the National Geographic Channel, which combines the down-home trend with the backyard-tinkering, machine-shop ethos of shows like "Destroy Build Destroy" and "American Chopper".
These techniques are shedding light on the dynamic and mechanistic properties of molecular machines, both in vivo and in vitro.
"We only started to explore this space and are fascinated in the space between the biological and the mechanistic motion, when the machine becomes human," Koch tells The Creators Project.
On Butterflies and History of Two Chameleons defend a vitalist theory of animal life and contest the mechanistic theory of the animal-machine.
From a holistic perspective, the mechanistic understanding of single molecular machines does, however, not allow for a complete understanding of higher level systems.
Perhaps to evoke a bit more panic than usual, he allows himself a bit of propulsion on tracks like "Pain" and "Surrender," bringing in the mechanistic punishment of a few drum machines to ground his oft-astral synth work.
