Does the lego typewriter work

Typewriters have been out of vogue for decades but you can still easily find a decent one in working condition for less than the LEGO version (and a very nice one for somewhat more than that). As most LEGO sets, the LEGO typewriter is a collection of bricks designed to be assembled into one specific structure. It provides the feeling of achievement that is customary to an act of creation without challenging you to tread an uncertain path. Instead, you just have to follow the exact steps in the booklet, one by one, and you will have a guaranteed result as portrayed on the box. And this end result does look very nice: a talented LEGO fan, Steve Guinness, came up with the first iterations and LEGO designers James May and Wes Talbott took great care in creating the commercial version of the set.And yet, this is a typewriter that is not an actual typewriter. It is real, you can hold it and you do build it with your own hands, but it is not real real: it's an artful, skillfully designed ghost shell of an object that functions only in the aesthetical dimension. It’s quite possible that more LEGO typewriters are purchased today than actual typewriters. The simulacrum has taken over reality. This is not a complaint: it’s an observation. I don’t have anything against it. I wouldn’t buy this LEGO set for myself, but if someone was ever to gift me one I would sigh, smile and then

Into the shape of a typewriter. I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but I just couldn’t shake off the uncanny valley effect after using a typewriter daily for the past few years.I kept coming back to the paradox of this object’s existence. It’s an assembly of plastic bricks and instructions which have the intended purpose of being a buildable visual approximation of a real-life object (a typewriter) that is completely deprived of its functionality (typing text on paper). I’m reading Simulacra and Simulation, which was a source of inspiration for the Wachowskis when they worked on The Matrix (1999). In the book, philosopher Jean Baudrillard speaks of how “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’”The LEGO typewriter is a simulacrum: it represents a real object’s appearance. It’s even designed to have some working mechanisms that are themselves an abstraction of an actual typewriter’s behavior. As you press on the LEGO keys, a plastic representation of the hammer strikes the paper, a plastic representation of the carriage advances a step and you can rotate a plastic representation of the platen to move an actual piece of paper through. These mechanisms are a visual imitation: the LEGO typewriter is incapable of actually typing a single letter. The paradox aspect for me is its economic value: this simulacrum of a typewriter as sold today in a store costs more money than an actual, functioning typewriter. The LEGO typewriter set goes for 249.99 $/€.

Dutifully sit down and assemble it. Probably hang it on the wall somewhere for decoration as a conversation piece.(There’s a certain Scandinavian rhyme to this if you jump from LEGO’s Denmark to neighboring Sweden and skip past the meatballs to get an IKEA chair. You also have to follow instructions in a booklet to get to a predetermined outcome, but the resulting object is a tool with a specific function (a piece of furniture to sit on). And there is also an aesthetical dimension in the way it is designed.)Gary Hustwit’s 2009 documentary Objectified explores our relationship with objects and design. In one of the interviews, Rob Walker says about consumer goods companies that “part of their agenda, whether it's overarticulated or not, is to make whatever used to be ‘now’ look like ‘then’ so that people will buy the new ‘now.’”The LEGO typewriter is an example of how the new “now” doesn’t even need to be tangible: it can be simulacra of the “then”. Other LEGO sets for adults recreate objects familiar to people who grew up in the 80s and 90s: a Polaroid camera, an Atari 2600, an NES with a CRT TV. Objects that are no longer generally used or that became functionally obsolete. It wouldn’t be as interesting if they were based on objects that are still commonplace or easily accessible (which feels like the reason a LEGO set of a smartphone or a TV remote wouldn’t have much success). These sets attempt to anchor to

Machine or lathe or saw, to apply letters on the page.” He said that typing was like “embossing or applying physical impressions on to a page, almost as if I had a chisel and was making a cut or a dye and making a mark on metal.” How does the typewriter itself inform your practice, and how do you see the relationship between typewriter aesthetics and digital practices? I ask because some of the poems are made digitally, or enhanced digitally, right?The typewriter for me is very much a tool like any other, except that it comes with this strange and rich history, this gendered history, this history of labor and standardization and industrialization that has become niche, hip, nostalgic. It would be unfair of me to say the typewriter is just a means of putting a letter onto a page because that would elide that history. Every time I type a poem, I carry that history of the medium with me. The digital is not so different. It’s a tool like any other. And it has histories for its various media like any other. I am not precious about where the analogue stops and the digital begins. I don’t know where and how to say “this much is typewriter and this much is digital” in these poems. I like that line to be porous and unclear. I am inspired, for example, by the digital turn that Judith Copithorne’s poetry has taken. I am inspired, too, by the laborious and beautiful typewriter work of Chris Warren. I am inspired by any work that wants to complicate that line between the analogue and the digital. OO: Typewriter Poems came out just last year, and your scholarly book Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry was published in 2018. Were you making the typewriter poems while researching Anarchists in the Academy? Does your practice as a poet inform your practice as a researcher, or is it the other way around? I’m interested in how creative practice and research practice might reinvigorate or reenergize one another.Yes, I was working on these two projects at the same time. Anarchists is an edited version of my doctoral thesis. I was writing some of these earliest poems as I finished and defended my Ph.D. I got my first writer’s grant (a Toronto Arts Council Emerging Writer’s Grant) while I was editing Anarchists, so I was working on the earliest stages of OO while finishing up Anarchists. My practice as a poet and as a researcher is the same thing, most days, except one pays a little more. They are directly forming and influencing each other all the time. Often, my research gets