Turing's Thinking Machines: Resonances with Surrealism & the Avant-Garde of the Early 20th Century

This paper examines the thinking machines depicted in the visual and theoretical works of Surrealism and other avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. The aim is to establish to what extent the conceptions of these machines prefigure Turing's ideas about the mechanical brain. Whereas Surrealism and its artistic antecedents (such as the Dadaists) are generally thought to have been uninterested in or mistrustful of such technological developments, it will shown that a number of artists/theorists (Ernst, Duchamp, Picabia, Hausmann, Matta, Dali, Caillois) envisaged the notion of the thinking machine in a manner which anticipated a number of Turing's ideas (the gendered machine, machine consciousness, the child-machine, pleasure-pain systems, randomness).