Karel Čapek: Robots in the Arts

The American Robot: A Cultural History by Dustin A. Abnet Although they entered the world as pure science fiction, robots are now very much a fact of everyday life. Whether a space-age cyborg, a chess-playing automaton, or simply the smartphone in our pocket, robots have long been a symbol of the fraught and fearful relationship between ourselves and our creations. In tracing the history of the idea of robots in US culture, Abnet draws on intellectual history, religion, literature, film, and television.

Androids, Golems, and Prometheus by Fabián Banga Representation of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, vol. 1: Androids, Golems, and Prometheus addresses the way in which artificial intelligence, mechanical anthropoids, golems, and similar types of robots are represented in contemporary culture. This book argues that human limitations constrain the possibilities and potentials of artificial intelligence. These imaginaries have more to do with who we are as a society and as individuals than with the characteristics of our mechanical creations.

An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines by Kathleen Richardson This book looks at how researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology design robots. It examines our cultural understandings of robots, and how fiction informs the researchers' practice. The book explores anthropological theories about we see robots as intelligent, autonomous, social, and woven into lived social realities. Richardson charts the move away from the "worker" robot of the 1920s to the "social" one of the 2000s.

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot by Gregory Jerome Hampton This interdisciplinary study seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future.

Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human.

Tech Anxiety: Artificial Intelligence and Ontological Awakening in Four Science Fiction Novels by Christopher A. Sims This project examines the representation of anxiety about technology that humans feel when encountering artificial intelligences in four science fiction novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Neuromancer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Cloud Atlas. By exploring this anxiety, something profound can be revealed about what it means to be a person living in a technologically saturated society.

Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History by Kara Reilly The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of courtly desire, the uncanny Olympia, and the revolutionary Robots in post-WWI drama.

The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808-2008 by Cathy S. Gelbin The Hulk, Superman, and the Terminator are all modern popular culture echoes of the golem, that mystical, artificial man of legend, a friendly Jewish version of Frankenstein's monster. Widely seen as an icon of authentically Jewish lore, the golem has inspired a broad range of writers across ethnic, cultural, and national affiliations. The Golem Returns contends that the modern popular culture theme of the golem is the product of the complex cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews since the early modern period.

Cyborgs in Latin America by J. Andrew Brown Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity.

Phylum machinica: Narratives of Anorganic Life in Contemporary Science, Philosophy and American Fiction by Mark Alan Sander This UCLA dissertation investigates the topos of the machinic phylum in several scientific, philosophical, and literary texts written in the late twentieth century. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari may have coined the phrase machinic phylum, but the cultural fascination with this notion has become widespread. The figure of the machinic phylum functions as one mode in which scientists, philosophers, and novelists explore a new, posthuman concept of subjectivity that would seem to revise the liberal humanist model.

Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama by Harold B. Segel The publication of "Pinocchio" on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses. Puppets, marionettes, and other forms figure vividly and provocatively in modernist and avant-garde drama. Dramatists used puppets to satirize the tyranny of bourgeois custom and convention, to deflate the arrogance of the powerful, and to breathe new life into a theater that had become tradition-bound and commercialized.

Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Judith B. Kerman (Editor) This book of essays looks at the multitude of texts and influences which converge in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, especially the film’s relationship to its source novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Contributors discuss the film’s psychological and mythic patterns, importance political issues and the roots of the film in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, detective fiction, and previous science fiction cinema.

The Golem Remembered, 1909-1980: Variations of a Jewish legend by Arnold L. Goldsmith In Jewish folklore, a famous sixteenth-century rabbi allegedly created a man of clay from the banks of the Moldau River, to protect the Jewish people in times of persecution. This early golem was clumsy, performed menial tasks, and could not speak. Four hundred years later, new tales portrayed the golem as intelligent and articulate. How shall we account for these changes in portrayal?

Reading Westworld by Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay (Editors) The essays in this book engage in a series of original inquiries into the central themes of the series, including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show's fundamental question: Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Film in the Anthropocene: Philosophy, Ecology, and Cybernetics by Daniel White This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of film in the context of the Anthropocene: the new geological era in which human beings have collectively become a force of nature. Daniel White draws on perspectives in philosophy, ecology, and cybernetics to explore human self-understanding through film in the new era. Both feature and documentary films are considered.

Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film by J. P. Telotte This book offers the first application of ecology theory to film studies, shifting attention from history to the media environment. The robot has given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of otherness, and for asking asking what it means to be human. This study of the cinematic robot, while mainly focused on science fiction film, also examines its appearance in musicals, cartoons, television, advertising, toys, and literature.

Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems by Bruce Clarke From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs. New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines.

Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity by Sue Short This book breaks new ground in providing an in-depth critical assessment of cyborg cinema, arguing that it remains one of the most provocative genres to have emerged in contemporary screen culture. Tracing the cinematic cyborg's transition over the last two decades and evaluating the theoretical significance attributed to this figure, it asks what relevance the cyborg continues to have in terms of understanding human identity, our relationship to technology, and to one another.

Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Its Influence on the American Science Fiction Film: Blade Runner, Terminator I + II by John-Paul Trutnau With modern technology taking control of 20th-century society and the human element steadily diminishing, the robot figure in film takes on an increasing fascination. How far can computers go in manipulating human beings? How trustworthy is modern science in keeping control over its fast-growing technological developments?

Artificial Humans : Manic Machines, Controlled Bodies by Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen, Gabriele Jatho (Editors) A collection of essays on the figure of the cyborg in contemporary film and culture, this book examines such classics as Frankenstein, Bladerunner, Robocop, the Alien series, and the two Terminator films. It also addresses artificial intelligence and virtual reality. With plenty of film stills and behind-the-scenes commentary from filmmakers like James Cameron and Ridley Scott, Artificial Humans combines the qualities of a film book, a cultural studies text, and a work of science fiction.

Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz Part human, part machine, the cyborg is the hero of an increasingly popular genre of American film and, as Rushing and Frentz so provocatively suggest, a cultural icon emblematic of an emergent postmodern mythology of the hunter. Using the cyborg film as a point of departure, the authors examine how we rework Western myths and initiation rites in the face of new technologies.

Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film by J. P. Telotte People are fascinated by robots. Telotte traces the development of robots from science fiction literature through early cinematic landmarks such as Metropolis (1926) and the alien films of the 1950s, to the recent explorations of the artificial humans in Blade Runner, Robocop, and the Terminator films. This history shows us how the sci-fi genre has always addressed changing cultural attitudes toward technology, the body, gender roles, human intelligence, reality, and even film itself.

Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire and the Early Modern World by Jessica Keating In the 16th and 17th centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. This book recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meanings they held. These ornate clockwork automata represented a variety of subjects in motion, from religious figures to animals. Their movements were driven by gears, wheels, and springs painstakingly assembled by clockmakers.

Hello, Robot: Design between Human and Machine by Mateo Kries, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, and Amelie Klein (Editors) Robotics are becoming part of our everyday lives. Design functions as a mediator to make robots into visible reality, moving them out from behind the facades of washing machines, cars, and ATMs. We can expect to encounter these intelligent machines: in industry, in the military, and in everyday settings; at nurseries and retirement homes; in our bodies and in the cloud; when shopping and having sex; in video games and, of course, in film and literature.

Robot: A Visual Atlas from Ancient Greece to Artificial Intelligence by Luca Beatrice Robots have infiltrated our social consciousness. They are everywhere, from visual art, to literature, to theater. Robots feature heavily in cinema; they star in innumerable comic strips and cartoons. In fields like design, architecture and fashion, 'robot' became a style in itself. As this book tracks the conceptual development of the robot through western cultural history, it uncovers the roots of our fascination with artificial humanity.

Thinking Like a Machine: An Artist's Journey into Robotics by Niki Passath (Editor) In many modes of behavior, people act more and more like machines. At work, we have become 'human resources' that can be replaced at will. Do people have a purpose any more? Do we already think like machines? Do we have a "master-slave" relationship with them? Are we no longer any more than an organic prosthetic fitted to an inorganic body? With his robotic creations, Niki Passath problematizes our relationship with machinery. Critics reflect on his contributions.

Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis by Damith Herath, Christian Kroos, and Stelarc (Editors) A first compendium on robotic art, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world we share with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative social changes that arise when robots take on new roles alongside humans. It leads us into a strange, beautiful, uncanny, and daring world--into the minds and works of some of the world's most prolific creators of robotic art.

My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves by Julie Wosk The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Wosk takes us on a fascinating tour through the history of artificially created women, revealing the array of cultural fantasies and fears they embody. In fiction, female automatons have been represented as objects of desire. But in many works, the "perfect" woman turns out to be artificial, becoming a source of uncanny horror. Lavishly illustrated.

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination by Minsoo Kang From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton--better known today as the robot--has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must examine how these ideas were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West.

The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin by Matthew Biro In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, this book explains how the cyborg as we know it today developed between 1918 and 1933 as German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture by Bruce Grenville (Editor) One of the most persistent and intriguing cultural images of the 20th century, the cyborg exists at the intersection of science, technology and culture, and is understood here as an uncanny image that reflects our shared fascination and dread of the machine and its presence in our daily lives.

Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame by Toni Dove Limited edition artist's book. Fiction. Thomas Edison's friend Lord Ewald falls in love with a beautiful courtesan whom he considers to be the ideal of female beauty. He is shattered when she opens her mouth to speak and he discovers 'the soul of a bourgeois.' Edison takes pity on his friend and creates for him the perfect woman--an android. The construction of the android was inspired by Tomorrow's Eve, written by Villiers de l'Ilse-Adam in 1886.

Dance Notations and Robot Motion by Jean-Paul Laumond and Naoko Abe (Editors) How can we write down a sequence of movements? Who will write them down, and who will read them? They may be choreographers working with dancers. They may be roboticists programming robots. They may be artists designing cartoons in computer animation. Unfortunately there is no universal language for recording movements. Experts from many fields met together to discuss their different systems for notating movements.

Controls and Art: Inquiries at the Intersection of the Subjective and the Objective by Amy LaViers and Magnus Egerstedt (Editors) Dancing humanoids, robotic art installations, and music generated by mathematically precise methods are no longer science fiction. The research in this anthology uses techniques from the world of art to inspire methods in control, enables artistic endeavors using advanced control theory, and aids in the analysis of art using metrics devised by a systems theoretic approach. The majority of the chapters are authored jointly by experts in control theory and by artists, including dancers, choreographers, puppeteers and painters.

Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation by Steve Dixon ; with contributions by Barry Smith The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology in the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance; new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations. This book traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this new media art.