← A. Inventions, No. 40
Burton Koenig (1900–1978)
Koenig’s Movie System
1965
Koenig Cinematic, est. 1962, Los Angeles, California. ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) with acrylic and aluminum. 5½ × 3 × 7⅝". Collection of the author.
Burt Koenig was a retired Los Angeles sound engineer who wanted to bring all the tools of expressive storytelling to the people.
Through three decades at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he touched more than four hundred films, Koenig learned the critical importance of sound in shaping a story. While established camera manufacturers pushed the silent Super 8 format, Koenig saw the how the contributions of voice actors, foley artists, and composers brought life to the screen, and he was determined to bring this same dimension to amateur film. The product he proposed was not merely a multifunctional movie camera and audio field recorder, but a library of sounds with which film could be effortlessly overlaid. Koenig’s project was stymied in 1966, when the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees filed for an injunction, arguing that Koenig’s work infringed the rights of a foley artist named Walter Mirvins. Interestingly, the union argued not that Koenig had plagiarized Mirvins’ recordings, but that his studied examination of Mirvins’ technique had allowed Koenig to convincingly imitate their signature style. Expert testimony regarding the ‘Mirvins footfalls’ recording collapsed into a farcical courtroom episode in which judge Ronald L. McGuigan was confronted with seventy-one soundstage recordings of footsteps on gravel — and then, the simultaneous filing of Forgách v. Mirvins, which claimed an obscure 1949 film as a precedent that had inspired Mirvins himself! Koenig’s settlement with the iatse foreclosed his project, but did it ensure that never again would audio recordings be imitated, reinterpreted, parodied, repeated, referenced, or allowed to influence others? Was Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) the final film to feature the sound of footsteps on gravel, forever enshrining Mirvins (or Forgách?) as a household name, a beloved Hollywood legend, and a hero to recording artists everywhere? Or did all of them, and their entire industry, become the bane of the Los Angeles County Superior Court?
Published January 19, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.
About
The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.
These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions, an inversion of the more pressing debate in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.
Previously:
No. 39. Stereoscopic Printing Presses
Next:
No. 41. Leyden Jars
