The mechanical joke maker

The world of mechanical automata is a fairly small one. Possibly the most well known form of automata is the rather creepy, wooden character who bangs away at a shoe in the cobbler’s shop window.
There is a more artful side to this form of vintage hacking, however, as can be seen by the extraordinary and strange work of Falmouth based automata maker, Paul Spooner. Over the years, Spooner has made some true oddities, including the cat who drinks poisoned milk, dies, comes back alive and does it all over again; the women who swallows the day and leaves the night behind; and the man who produces a pipe from his head.
Mechanical jokes
In defining his work, Spooner says, “I call them mechanical jokes really. The mechanism is the medium and my intention is to make people laugh or to at least feel something.”
One of my favourite pieces by Spooner is called The Science of Conversation: two men sit opposite each other and they share a brain. Each of them can only talk when the brain is in his head – the brain is passed between the two men via a fishing rod-like lever.
Spooner explains, “I was in Cyprus visiting my dad when I first thought of it. It’s a kind of physical joke. When the brain goes into the head it engages the mechanism that makes the jaw work and when it is not there it cancels it. There are certain tribes of people who can only speak in a group if they’ve got the talking stick so it is a bit like that but taking it to another level by saying that you have to have your brain in your head before you talk.”
It also suggests that the person who is not talking is not listening either – after all, he hasn’t got a brain at that point. Spooner says, “That is where my dad comes in because I would be thinking about something, possibly thinking about this machine, while he was talking about something that happened in Egypt in 1956.”
The workshop
His workshop, while it is cluttered with volumes of sketches and half-finished creations, is fairly low on cutting-edge tools.
Spooner says, “I’ve got a small Myford lathe, a drilling machine and quite a fancy fret saw but I’m not that inclined to get complicated. I do like machinery and nothing would give me more pleasure than owning a Bridgeport mill or something like that but I know I don’t deserve it and I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. I’ve seen people with those mills and they have to be very disciplined. It’s a responsibility that I’m not prepared to shoulder.”
Commissions
A lot of Spooner’s work is sold at the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Falmouth, which is home to all manner of quirky automata. Spooner has also accepted commsions over the years but was put off the process ever since he, along with Will Jackson (who is making a humanoid robot calledrobothespian) were asked to make wooden, life-sized people, designed to hold Louis Vuitton handbags for the companies centenary.
Spooner says, “They were just incredibly snooty. Some of them were quite nice but there was something very bothersome about the whole project because it had to be extremely right and these figures were supposed to be for handbags to be hung on. They came to us and said can you make seven life size figures in your style by February, I think it was November when they asked, and it was the most terrifying job I had to do.”
Despite this, he has recently accepted a commission for a school playground. He has designed a goat that can do a hand (hoove) stand when you turn a handle. As he is concerned the children will break the machine, Spooner has created the goat to sit on a platform 3m high.