Rosellini's 1737 Mechanical Pig: Until the little-known 1994
publication of Masquerading at
Shower-Lourdes by Fatima Michelle Vieuchanger, followed by the even less-known multimedia monograph
On the
Holodeck with Rosellini's 1737 Mechanical Pig, there had been no confirmed sightings in the 20th
century of
either the original Rosellini or the van Gelderschott forgery. By late 1997, a handful of eccentric characters
were pursuing both pigs from Florida to Scotland in a kind of global shell game involving virtual reality and
time travel. If their progress was being monitored by a small but loyal audience, they could not know it. But
one computer model, based on amateur videotape footage shot in Inverness and published anonymously on the
Internet, proposed that Rosellini's supposed 147 moving parts were organized around 9 basic components, 3 of
which remained relatively fixed in place. The components ingeniously combined one, two, and three at a time to
reproduce such movements as blinking, swimming, or defecating. According to the author of this theory, the
market value of such a pig, if it really existed — or of a high-quality facsimile such as van
Gelderschott's
alleged 1884 forgery — was incalculable.
PIG 2.x OPTIONS
PIG 1.x
PIG 3.x
