Fleur is a design historian broadly focused on replication, reproduction and knowledge transference of medieval design technologies - in both modern and medieval contexts. Recipient of the Dr Sylvia Lennie England Bursary (V&A Museum), and the Design History Society’s Undergraduate Essay Prize 2019, she spent pre-lockdown 2020 on a term exchange at Bard Graduate Center in NYC. Here she focused on digital archaeology, traces of Jewish material culture in medieval Cairo, and working with teenagers in gallery outreach programmes. She has a BA History from UCL (First Class Honours), following on from her Art Foundation, and has also been part of National Youth Theatre as a Costume Technician and Teaching Assistant from 2013. She loves engaging publics with histories, design and heritage in an accessible way - History as Public Practice was her favourite unit on the MA. She is now Digital Producer for the David Parr House Museum in Cambridge, using digital mediums to communicate their story of working class Victorian design history.
Fleur Elkerton
I've taken part in and produced many projects during my MA, but one especially exemplifies my practice. Just after lockdown began, I co-founded Design in Quarantine - a digital archive that collects pandemic designs in real time - with a course mate, Anna Talley. We were wondering how we as design historians could respond to the unfolding events, and what they would look like. We have been interviewed by the New York Times, featured in the Financial Times, ICON magazine, Disegno Journal, the Evening Standard, the V&A's Pandemic Object series and more. We also produced a successful AcrossRCA workshop, ALT/ARChive, and presented for the Design History Society's Student Forum after winning a Virtual Student Award. Currently we are on display at Somerset House as part of the London Design Biennale 2021's Design in an Age of Crisis installation, have been invited to run our own workshop by ICOM, and will be presenting at the Design History Society's Memory Full conference this autumn. We now have well over 450 archived designs and still receive regular submissions.
My dissertation analyses how automata, as highly designed, complex technological objects, came to be elevated and materially realised in late medieval Europe. Exploring scholastic and craft relationships to mechanical technology, it assesses how automata engendered collaborative design practice in their construction; both imaginatively and practically. Automata dance across the boundaries of societies, cultures and centuries. They were liminal, fascinating objects whose presence enables a design historian to trace the long term and intersocietal exchanges of a particular form of design knowledge - mechanics - across cultures and centuries.
It concludes that medieval automata were microcosmic models of late medieval Europe’s relationship to mechanical design. This is evidenced in the first chapter’s analysis of late medieval automata as symbolic entertainment devices, constructed from collaboration between craftsmen to communicate authority during observed performances in coronation pageants, to mischievously entertaining guests who had the luxury of leisure time in mechanical pleasure gardens.
The starting point of Christendom’s connection to automata is established in the second chapter, where medieval automata are proven to be representative of intersocietal exchanges of design knowledge between the Dar-al-Islam and the Latin West. Constituting of diagrammatic plans of mechanical devices and practical instructions on their construction, analysis of Islamic treatise sources from the early ninth to thirteenth century illuminate that this design knowledge was acquired from the Hellenistic world and evolved by Muslim scholars. The intersocietal exchange of this knowledge with Christendom is also indicated through the translation movement, gift-giving, travelogues and the Crusades, yet in Europe it was viewed as foreign.
The last chapter determines that as the late Middle Ages progressed, automata shifted from being alien knowledge into textual intellectual theories and frameworks, before being finally realised materially. By focusing on the practice of thinking mechanically, and how this is evidenced in both scholastic and craft knowledge, it ends on the interplay between the two and how this was displayed in popular literature and cultural tropes. An impression of late medieval European society that was familiar with automata, their design and construction is evoked.
They lived in a mechanism minded world, where automata could be observed physically, read and listened to in literature, and experienced through prevalent materials and metaphors. Automata became communicative artefacts. Thinking mechanistically even led to imaginative experimentation of automata forms, as evidenced in sketchbook sources, establishing mechanical design as a valid craft, devoid of the mistrust attached to its non- Christian origins.