Mobiles

This week I’d like to talk to you about the artist Alexander Calder. Calder was active in the early 20th century and late 19th century, so he’s well past the Ars Magica period but I think his work is interesting enough to us that we could sculpt a mystery cult around it.

You’re familiar with the descendants of Calder’s work even if you’ve never heard of him yourself. He was the person who popularized kinetic sculptures – that is, artworks that move – and when Marcel Duchamp saw his kinetic sculptures he referred to them in French as “mobiles. This is where we get the name for the things that are hung over the cots of babies.

Because we’re used to hanging them over the cots of babies we no longer see what astonishing ideas these kinetic sculptures were. Occasionally you’ll see very large, industrially produced ones that give you some sense of their grandeur when they were first exhibited, but let’s think through plot hooks surrounding hermetic mobiles.

Essential to the mobile is that, when created, the sculpture has a center of
mass that’s in some way unstable, so that when a small amount of force comes from outside the system it creates a visual difference within the system. This leads to several plot hooks.

The first one is that although in the real world the energy that drives mobiles is generally the wind, the hand of a parent, or kicks from children, in Mythic Europe there is another system that could provide this initial energy and that’s the washing tide of vim that circulates around the Axis Magica and allows spell-casting. Now we know that this creates a spiritual pressure. Magicians can feel the pressure, particularly when it is absent: that is, when they go into cathedrals they feel their Gift flickering and that’s the absence of this flow. Is it possible to have an item placed within a
mobile so that it moves because of the changes in the vim field? I think, perhaps, yes. We know that vis coalesces in areas of high vim concentration: that is it becomes a material object where the field is densest/biggest/deepest (choose your metaphor) so if you had an object, that contained the right style of vis, within the structure of the mobile the tides of them that wash the earth could make the mobile move.

Now there is an argument, and its not one that I’ve used in the past, but it exists so let’s work it through, that the tides are these are pulled by astrological bodies in the same way that water is pulled by the moon, creating the oceanic tides this would mean that your mobile could respond to the movements of the stars. This allows you to create an orrery. An orrery is a machine used to predict or to calculate the position of stars, either retrospectively to allow natal horoscopes or prospectively to choose the appropriate times for taking actions. A character who was part of an
astrological cult that made auras based on this flow of them using mobiles would have a Craft skill to create mobiles that acted as their cult initiation lore.

In a related idea one of the things I like about mobiles is that they’re non-reproducible. Your character can’t just copy them the way they can copy a book, so they could become part of a museum collection, for example. We’ve called these realia in the game. Alternatively they could become a fixed object, a static treasure, that you can’t move around the place. They could explain why the characters have chosen to settle a particular covenant site. It could be that a particular mobile is there.

There might be some sort of link between mobiles and automata but they’re
covered in a great deal of depth in the two versions of the mysteries rules.
Automation are in some sense engines that is they’re designed to do things
whereas mobiles I see at least as being more reactive to the environment. They reflect things.

The other thing they could encode beyond the craft skill to make them is a Cult Lore skill, which is similar to Enigmatic Wisdom in that it’s a skill that is gained not by developing knowledge but through a process of emotional development because of the play of sacred symbols across the psyche of the initiate. This ties into things that we’ve discussed before: Gothic art in cathedrals, for example. A mobile that grants Virtues to characters who meditate upon its movements sounds what sort of thing that House Criamon could devise, but it also sounds like the sort of thing that House Jerbiton could devise. for example it could be an attempt to train a character in the Free Expression Virtue.

Fairies may not be able to create these mobiles but they may want to put people inside them so that they develop Free Expression but if they just start rounding up random peasants and throwing them into the device what waking dreams will they have? What terrible stories will they tell? What fairies will they let loose upon the surrounding community?

There is a Calder exhibit on at the National Gallery of Victoria at the moment and one of the curators, in her description of the exhibit, points out that for Calder, wires were lines. In the same way a magician who wants to create a perfect book may wish to create a quill using a peacock’s feather, or a piece of phoenix, or a reed cut from the lands of the Egyptian dead, so similarly if you are creating a mobile you will probably want an extraordinary wire. Sseeking the materials for this wire, and the places where the wire can be drawn (for example the smithies of Haphaestus) require stories.

As a final thought a mobile could be used as part of a magician’s longevity ritual. This would make it into something like a portrait of Dorian Gray. It’s a piece of art that works, so long as it’s undisturbed, to prevent the magician gaining decrepitude.