In the first of a series of new texts responding to the themes of Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure, Tendai Mutambu charts a history of the black automaton.
Content warning: This article includes references to racism and racist imagery.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, the clang of a mechanical figure’s mallet striking the hour resonated from clock towers across the continent. It was one of many types of automata that populated sacred and secular spaces – churches, palace gardens, town squares – emerging as a symbol of an increasingly mechanised world. In England, the clock-striking figure was referred to as ‘Jack’; in Flanders, ‘Jean’; in France, ‘Jaquemart’; and in Germany, ‘Hans’.1 Each performed the same basic function, yet their names gave them a local inflection.
By the eighteenth century, these clock-striking automata – along with automated religious tableaux – had proliferated, occupying a notable place not only in Europe’s cultural landscape but in its scientific and political spheres as well. When John Miles, a local watchmaker from Stroud, built the Blackboy clock in 1774, he was operating in a tradition where automata had not only become established objects of entertainment and ideological instruction, but stages for enacting fantasies of control during a period of colonial expansion and at the height of the Transatlantic slave trade. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault described automata as ‘political puppets’ and ‘small-scale models of power’, evoking King Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786), otherwise known as the ‘meticulous king of small machines’ – whose obsession with the regimented precision of well-trained militaries was reflected in his fascination with the manipulable mechanics of automata.2
In the nineteenth century, the android – a robot cloaked in human likeness – stepped onto the scene of Victorian life, appearing in the corridors of London galleries, the mirrored arcades of Paris, and the ornate vitrines of German catalogues.3 In Manhattan’s bustling saloons and the shadowed parlours of Philadelphia’s manors, these figures stood as silent witnesses to displays of wealth and coveted objects of wonder – their mimetic artifice stirring delight and awe within onlookers.4 Even on plantations, these mechanical beings found their way into the peculiar spaces of showrooms and the pages of elite collectors’ catalogues.5
This essay considers how Black automata occupy a fraught position at the nexus of mechanisation, forced labour, and rebellion, entangled in histories of scientific racism. At times roughly hewn, at times eerily human, these figures – in their racist caricature – speak to the flurry of anxieties propelled by the threat of black freedom. I’m interested in how black automata, from grotesque caricatures of Toussaint Louverture to the Black androids of the Victorian era, have been used to bolster white supremacy, and how contemporary artists such as Dan Guthrie and Donald Rodney have responded to the racial machinations and semiotics of these objects.

Switzerland, in the manner of Jean David Maillardet, clock, automata, c.1815. The Johnston Collection, East Melbourne. Foundation Collection, 1989, A0494.
The Johnston Collection, a house museum in East Melbourne, Australia, holds an automaton clock: a vulgar expression of white animus that caricatures the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture.6 It’s a grim artefact of colonial contempt belonging to a genre known as the Pendule au Nègre Fumeur (The Smoking Negro Clock7).7 Attributed to the French-Swiss automata-maker Jean David Maillardet, the clock in the Johnston Collection is a 64-centimetre mechanical effigy of Louverture placed atop a rosewood music box, its left arm akimbo while the other clutches a hookah pipe. The figure is dressed in orientalised garb – part-princely, part-militaristic pastiche – including a long gilt-bronze coat with floral patterns, epaulettes, knee-length trousers, and red boots with gold trim. Each of Louverture’s ears sport a hoop ring with a hanging ornament, while his upper arms are adorned with bejewelled bracelets. The ornateness of his attire recalls Napoleon’s pejorative name for Louverture – ‘the gilded African’8 – here made literal by Maillardet in his conflation of several styles from so-called Eastern cultures.
In his physiognomy, Louverture is cast in the manner of an egregiously racist stereotype: the blackamoor. As is common with the trope, his skin is miscoloured, his lips are painted a garish red (as if to match his boots), combined with ornate flourishes. The caricatured objecthood extends to his distended stomach which doubles as the timepiece. When wound, the figure’s head lolls back and forth. His eyes dart mechanically from side to side as if to suggest an altered state of consciousness, or quite simply a buffoonishness at odds with the celebrated Louverture’s reputation as a formidable tactician and leader. In a further act of mockery, beneath the elaborate costume, as one writer suggests, the clock’s pendulum crudely mimics a scrotum swinging between his legs.9 In this gaudy bit of decor, Louverture, the architect of the only successful slave revolt in modern history and a rebel feared by the French regime, is punitively (and quite literally) reduced to a diminutive tabletop figure to render him powerless and to make fun of his well-known diminutive stature.
Maillardet’s clock is an example of the Black automaton as lurid white fantasy: a cipher of endless repetition and addled docility that performs its assigned tasks for the aggrandisement of its maker and the amusement of its possessor. It’s a model of subservience, a talisman of conquest frozen in an endless loop of subjugation. What does it mean to render, in such a derisive manner, arguably the most prominent and inspirational leader advocating for Black independence from France in the years immediately following the revolution? Like all the other Louverture clocks made around the same time, which formed a kind of perverse genre, Maillardet’s was a way of diminishing a genuine threat when the possibility of similar slave rebellions spreading felt imminent.
In their article ‘Black Steam, Patents, Portals, and the Counter-Histories of the Victorian Android’, historians Edward Jones-Imhotep and Alexander Offord argue that the appearance of Black androids, a subcategory of Black automata, surged at ‘moments of Black liberation: slave revolts, abolitionist movements, and emancipation.’10 These spikes, they suggest, mirrored the rise of scientific racism and the formalisation of racial categories in the Victorian era – or, in the many versions of the Louverture automaton clocks, the fear provoked by Haitian independence in 1804. In their racial denigration, these mechanised figures embodied complex anxieties about control, envy, desire, and the threat of Black autonomy.

Zadoc P. Dederick, 'Steam Man', 1868. Photo: George O. Bedford. From The New York Public Library.
Take, as a case-in-point, Zadoc P. Dederick’s ‘Steam Man’ as Jones-Imhotep and Offord do. It’s an invention that captured these tensions so acutely. Issued U.S. Patent 75,874 on 24 March, 1868, for an ‘Improvement in Steam Carriage’, Dederick’s android was conceived as a replacement for draft horses. At nearly eight feet tall, its torso housed a steam engine powering a system of levers designed to mimic human gait, enabling it to pull attached vehicles. While the steam engine itself was a familiar technology, the ambulatory mechanism at the android’s core was novel.11 But the most remarkable – and disturbing – feature is the figure’s head: an unmistakable caricature of a Black man sporting a top hat and smoking a pipe.
Here, a Black android is harnessed to a cart, its labour controlled by white passengers – a blatant vision of racialised servitude mechanised and reimagined in the era of nominal Black freedom. What the ‘Steam Man’ presented was a vision of Black labour’s ‘proper’ place during Reconstruction, a time of burgeoning Black industrial involvement and promises, however specious and unrealised, of liberation.12 Congress had only recently abolished the Black Codes, which confined Black labour to agrarian and domestic roles. What the ‘Steam Man’ encapsulated was a vision of curtailed mobility – a disciplining of Black freedom into mechanical submission – that took Black male gentility (symbolised by the top hat and pipe) as its target.
But the Black android carries another, subtler deception. While the overtly racist contortion of Black respectability is plain to see, it smuggles past another untruth: the myth that technology and Blackness are antithetical.13 Using the industrial tools of its time – steam, clockwork, electricity – the android’s surface presented Black figures in ‘pastoral, leisurely, or non-technological roles’, reinforcing this false opposition.14 This fiction, which soothed the sting of waning white dominance and inherited superiority, reached its peak as Black workers were entering white labour markets as skilled tradespeople.15 Through the ‘Steam Man’, white society could frame Blackness as both a mechanical commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated at will in the name of development, on the one hand, and a foil to technological modernity on the other: a paradox that continues to shape the fraught intersection of race and automation today.16

Thomas D. Rice in blackface as ‘Jim Crow’, 1836. From The New York Public Library.
Blackface minstrelsy, a phenomenon gripping Newark and the Northeast during the creation of Dederick’s ‘Steam Man’, offered fertile ground for the android’s racialised imaginary.17 As Jones-Imhotep and Offord observe, quoting Eric Lott in ‘Black Steam’, blackface expressed a ‘nearly insupportable fascination’ with Black people and their cultural practices, one cloaked in ‘self-protective derision’, operating at the tense juncture of ‘panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure’ and giving shape to a collective white obsession with Blackness.18 Among blackface’s two archetypes, Dederick’s patent drew heavily on the figure of the Northern dandy. While the genre frequently targeted Southern plantation life, its origins lay in the urban Northeast of the 1830s. Intimately tied to the declining status of junior artisans like Dederick, these characters formed a complementary pair: the dandy, refined to the point of absurdity, and the rustic simpleton, unpolished but ‘authentic’.19 The dandyish Zip Coon, emerged through the performances of George Washington Dixon, whose character, with his top hat, starched collar, and affected airs, drew the ire of working-class audiences, embodying both racialised and class-based tensions.20 As a parody of Black gentility, the dandy represented a figure of mockery and resentment, his perceived sophistication undermined by his presumed lack of ‘authenticity’.21 By 1834, Zip Coon rivaled Jim Crow in popularity, the two figures together – like a pendant portrait – defining a vision of Blackness that ‘white audiences could both mourn and deride’.22
‘Minstrelsy as the currency of success in the African-American negotiations with white corporate America’, is how the critic Greg Tate characterised a key concern in Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s turn of the millennium satire in which a frustrated Black media executive proposes a modern minstrel show to get himself dismissed and lay bare the racism of the network.23 (Much to his shock, his racist idea is not only taken up by the network but the series is a hit.) It is the entanglement of racialised performance, entertainment, labour, and capital that artist Donald Rodney interrogates so ingeniously in his work Pygmalion (1997). In its most recent showing as part of Visceral Canker – Rodney’s touring retrospective which began at Spike Island, Bristol (25 May – 8 September 2024) – the animatronic sat at the end of a long corridor. Pygmalion is a fairground artefact that draws on the figure of the ‘Laughing Policeman’, a staple of British seaside arcades throughout the early- to mid-twentieth century and coin-operated automata of Al Jolson, the popular minstrel performer, often with accompaniment.24 At Pygmalion’s centre is an effigy of Michael Jackson in a glass case lit from within, set in motion not by coins but by ambling gallery attendees triggering a sensor. Once activated, the figure – sporting Jackson’s signature Napoleonic military jacket, 1980s Jheri curl, and rhinestone glove – convulses mechanically, its torso, arms, and head jerking in awkward, disjointed motion. But what is perhaps central to the roughly life-size automaton’s effect on viewers is its facial features. Rendered in vivid blackface as if to not only reverse Jackson’s much-debated whitening over the course of his career, they push his image further into a violent parody of Blackness.
In September 1997, when Rodney debuted Pygmalion as part of his solo exhibition, Nine Night in Eldorado at South London Gallery, Michael Jackson was at the height of his career and soon to conclude his third and final world tour, HIStory – the highest earning by any solo act in the nineties. Referendums on his image were still being held frequently and vigorously. Was Jackson a race traitor, who had willingly altered his appearance and comportment for wider, mainstream appeal? Or was he simply a victim of racial pathologies (not to mention gendered and sexual ones too)? In Autoicon, Richard Birkett’s book-length study of Rodney’s early computer experiments, Birkett notes how Rodney, who collected newspaper clippings on Jackson over the years, had long been fascinated by how tabloids treated the popstar and the ways in which he was cast ‘in the mould of a Victorian sideshow’.25

Donald Rodney, Pygmalion (1996–97). Wood, textile, plastic, paint, resin and metal. Installation view at Spike Island, Bristol. Birmingham Museums Trust on behalf of Birmingham City Council. Photo by Rob Harris
Notably, Rodney does not represent Jackson as the titular artist and creator but as a schlocky Galatea, a basic mechanism brought to life by our desire for spectacle as an audience, as if to thematise our complicity. As Birkett observes, Pygmalion is an inversion of the Greek myth; unlike Ovid’s sculptor who breathed life into ivory, Rodney transforms a living icon, an acclaimed performer, into a crude, lifeless automaton, reduced to occasionally performing ‘three silent robotic upper body movements’.26 The figure is entrapped for our entertainment, however streaked with ambivalence our response might be. As with Jackson the man, despite the shock and discomfort elicited by Pygmalion, it is impossible to look away. In Rodney’s reimagining of Jackson as a macabre puppet, the question of his agency in the spectacle – who pulled the proverbial strings – is left hanging in the air like a heavy theatrical fog.
The exhibitionary complex of funhouses and freak shows is never far from Jackson’s mythology, and is worth noting in any attempts to understand him as an entertainer. As the critic Margo Jefferson reminds us, the king of pop saw himself as an inheritor of the great American showman and circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum’s legacy, even distributing copies of Barnum’s biography to his staff.27 Jackson aspired to make his career ‘the greatest show on earth’.28 What, then, to make of this concerted and self-conscious positioning? Jackson surely knew that he sat within a lineage that begins with the chitlin circuit of his youth, extending to vaudeville’s so-called ‘freak shows’ all the way to the minstrel performances, which, according to Jefferson, gave white America its earliest encounter with staged Black performance – along with its first Black child stars.29 Rodney’s Pygmalion speaks to this provenance, foregrounding the tragicomic truths of a cultural history in which Blackness has long existed as a commodity – grist for the entertainment industry’s mill – even (or perhaps especially) when some of its keenest proponents have also been its worst victims.

Photographs of rotting Blackboy Clock figure. c. 1975–77. Photos by Lionel Walrond, digitised by Dr Ray Wilson, licenced under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
The question of where and how these legacies circulate today has been brought into focus by debates on what is to be done with racist objects and images. Built in 1774 and consisting of a childlike figure with black skin, red lips, and a gold feathered skirt, John Miles’ Blackboy Clock is one such object whose future has been deliberated over the last few years. In his right arm the small blackamoor wields a long-handled club with which he strikes a bell, dispensing of the ongoing duty to which he has been consigned. Where a left arm would usually be, a protrusion from the wall affixes the figure to the Stroud Teacher’s Centre building on Castle Street, once home to the National School for Girls (later known as ‘Blackboy School’). In one set of black and white images, taken some time between 1975 and 1977, he can be seen from a different vantage point to that afforded by most of the images in circulation online. Here, the figure appears a little worse for wear, his wooden face bearing a prominent crack on its right side. And from this trio of images, we can discern a little better the details of his lineaments and his awkwardly proportioned head, which is made to rotate.
What the images do not reveal, however, is whether Miles created the figure for his clock or if the figure was simply repurposed – an uncertainty that keeps open the possibility of a life before its subsequent timekeeping function. Since Miles was not a trained woodcarver, the idea of him adapting the figure seems more plausible.30 And much like its origins, we can never be certain how much of the original figure remains after years of repair and substitution. Perhaps like the Ship of Theseus, this racist image has been refurbished piece by piece, each constituent part substituted over time until nothing of the original remains, all the while leaving its overall composition and effect intact. It's strange to think how much effort and cost has gone into restoring and making functional this grotesque ‘horological curiosity’.
One thing we do know is that the figure’s life has been marked by long periods of being inoperative. On one occasion – in August 1974 – the Blackboy was removed from its perch for restoration by former pilot Michael Maltin, prompted by the bicentenary of the clock's assembly in 1774.31 By Maltin’s account, the wooden figure was in ‘rather a sorry state’, its head was rotten and the clock’s internal mechanisms were in ‘absolutely filthy condition’.32 With so much of the clock’s life punctuated by periods of malfunction, many of the records diligently compiled by Dan Guthrie for his project Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure (2025), give us a sense of the ensuing responses to the mechanism’s failures. What stands out in these accounts is the emotive register of the language used to convey how a white public has formed enduring and perverse attachments to this racist object – like the golliwogs and mammy-festooned bric-a-brac that many cling to for their sentimental value.
If the figure’s striking of the clock is a performance, we should ask: a performance of what, for whose entertainment, and to what effect exactly? Like the Louverture clock after the Haitian revolution or the ‘Steam Man’ post-Reconstruction, the Blackboy is made to serve the function of shoring up an image of blackness – for a largely white audience – that is docile, servile and, in its visual character, a cartoonish rendering of Black people as uncivilised. To encounter Black automata, androids, and similar figures is to reckon with histories of racialised spectacle – bodies conscripted into servitude and distilled into objects of cruel amusement. In their caricatures and jerking repetitions, these objects reveal fears of Black autonomy and the white desire for control. Yet if they speak to power’s capacity to reify racial hierarchies, they also expose the limits of such attempts – their cracked surfaces and defunct cogs serving as evidence of inevitable obsolescence. What forms of subversion does the black automaton invite? Will we dismantle it, leave it to decay, or détourn it – exorcising the ghost in the machine – by reworking its semiotics to critique the racist ideas upon which it was constructed?

Tendai Mutambu is a writer, editor, and curator based between London and Barcelona with an interest in contemporary artists' moving image, experimental cinema, and the essay film. He is currently developing two research projects: one on animation, the other on Blackness and the cinematic essay.