Long before silicon, one question was already being rehearsed in workshops, libraries, and novels: can a made thing think, feel, answer — even appear alive?

This lecture treats that question as the long prehistory of both media art and artificial intelligence, moving from the medieval legends of speaking brass heads attributed to Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, through Vaucanson's Digesting Duck and the punched cards of the Jacquard loom, into the literary machines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve — the novel that gave us the word android — and finally to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Read together, these episodes show that media art did not begin with the computer but grew out of a much older imagination in which automata, artificial bodies, and speculative machines were instruments for thinking about cognition, gender, labor, and language — making media art a long-standing form of knowledge production that has always used machines, real and imagined, to ask what it means to think, to speak, and to be alive.