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Representation of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Vol. 1

Androids, Golems, and Prometheus

by Fabian Banga (Author)
©2019 Monographs XXII, 100 Pages

Summary

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. These can be seen both in literature and in the cinema. This book does not seek to define or contain what artificial intelligence is. Rather, it argues our own limitations limit the possibilities and potentials of artificial intelligence. Representation of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Vol. 1 makes it clear these imaginaries have more to do with what we are as a society and individuals than with the parameters that these creations actually have.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Foreword to the Spanish Version: Phantom in the Machine (Jorge Monteleone)
  • Foreword to the English Version (Luisa Futoransky)
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: From Golems to Androids
  • The Golem
  • Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam—The Golem: How It Came Into the World (1920)
  • Astrology
  • The Occult Rituals
  • Metropolis (1927)
  • Frankenstein, Dracula, and Elena Obieta
  • Chapter 2: The Modern Robot
  • Robbie, the Vision of Asimov
  • The Three Laws
  • The Connection Between the Esoteric and the Scientific Elite in the Work of Asimov
  • The End of the Robots
  • 9 (2009)
  • AI Artificial Intelligence (2001)
  • Ex Machina (2014)
  • Chapter 3: When Robots Become Us
  • Alien Franchise
  • Prometheus (2012)
  • Alien: Covenant (2017)
  • Blade Runner (1982)
  • Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
  • Beyond the Anthropocentric and the Language Issue
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

← viii | ix →

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wife, Jane Dilworth, without whose invaluable support and knowledge this book would not have been possible. I am always thankful for her wisdom and guidance in this continuing voyage in this foreign and fascinating land of the north that is our home. ← ix | x →

← x | xi →

Foreword to the Spanish Version: Phantom in the Machine

Jorge Monteleone

That iconoclastic book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1: L’Anti-Œdipe, published in 1972, began with the image of life as a desiring production made up of machines. Everywhere machines, with their couplings, their connections and their currents: life is no longer conceived in the humanity-nature duality but as a series of desiring machines that produce and reproduce. The bodies themselves are machines that flow, that carry fluids connected with other bodies that at the same time are also machines that cut and redistribute those fluids. “Machines driving other machines,” Deleuze and Guattari wrote, “machines being driven by other machines, with all their necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth to machine coupled to it” (Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and ← xi | xii → Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983). On the first page of that volume the reproduction of a painting by Richard Lindner appeared, an oil on canvas called Boy with machine, from 1954. It is a very suggestive work: a caricatured child, disproportionate and with a round silhouette (“huge, pudgy, bloated boy” is described by Deleuze and Guattari). He seems to hold a thin cord connected to a machine that exceeds the limits of the painting, a machine made of levers, pulleys and cylinders that surround the child while the boy rests his right foot on the machine, as if the boy were part of the mechanism itself. The machine and the child are dependent on each other; as if they were a single entity, whose actions modify each other mutually. For the authors, Lindner’s painting allowed us to imagine how a “desiring machine” acted: it is not the case of a machine and a body that form a separate duality, but rather, the machine and the body are so closely linked to each other that both form a third object, “an enormous undifferentiated object”. That is, the ensemble of the painting, and not each of its parts, “functions as a desiring-machine.”

Details

Pages
XXII, 100
Year
2019
ISBN (PDF)
9781433172250
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433172267
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433172274
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433172243
DOI
10.3726/b15943
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (December)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2019. XXII, 100 pp.

Biographical notes

Fabian Banga (Author)

Fabian Banga is Chair of the Modern Languages Department at Berkeley City College. He holds a PhD, MA, and BA in Hispanic languages and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published six books and several articles of literary and cultural criticism.

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