Artificial lives

A cura di: Massimo Locatelli, Francesco Toniolo

Artificial lives

The humanoid robot in contemporary media culture

The theme of the humanoid robot has been entwined with media, literary and audiovisual imagery ever since the origins of the culture industry. This volume seeks to offer different perspectives of analysis on the cultural discourses related to robots, as they emerge in contemporary representations in film, television, and videogames.

Pages: 164

ISBN: 9788835142973

Edizione:1a edizione 2022

Publisher code: 10067.7

Info about Open Access books

The theme of the humanoid robot has been entwined with media, literary and audiovisual imagery ever since the origins of the culture industry. In its various versions, it has shaped visions and more often fears fuelled by modernity and technological progress. The humanoid robot is both a reality that today is taking on material and concrete forms and an imaginary and fantastic construct that embodies meanings and sensibilities established in decades if not centuries of fictional representations.
This volume seeks to offer different perspectives of analysis on the cultural discourses related to robots, as they emerge in contemporary representations in film, television, and videogames; to detechnologise this object of study, considering it in its dimension as a cultural construct, between fiction and reality, and rethinking the definition of the fundamental features of the idea of the human and the margins of its configurability.

Massimo Locatelli is an Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He is a founding member of NECS, the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies, member of the editorial board of CS. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies and Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, and author of several essays on the history of film psychologies and on film culture.

Francesco Toniolo is an adjunct professor in Film and Television Studies at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. He also teaches Game Culture at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan and Game Writing at the Scuola Internazionale di Comics of Florence. He conducts research on video games, online communities, YouTube, and intersections between different forms of art and narration in media. He has published several articles and books on these topics.

Introduction
(Janus and technology; Janus and the moral choice; Phenomenologies of the anthropomorphic robot; Bibliography)
Ruggero Eugeni, The Eloquent Dispositive. A Cultural Archaeology of Robotics
(The robot as a cultural subject: an archaeological and evolutionary approach; Discourses, bodies, narratives; Marks, surfaces, looks; Blending, recursions, remediations; The robotic dispositive; Bibliography)
Massimo Locatelli, The Paradoxes of Ultra-realism. The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis Reconsidered
(History of an idea; Phenomenology; Prospects; Bibliography)
Virgin Darelli, The Origins of the Cinematic Cyborg
(Introduction; The meaning of "cyborg"; The original cyborg; The bionic man; The replicant; The metaphorical cyborg; Cyborg cinema; Early cyborgs in movies and television (1960-1983); 1965. The first cyborg wave; 1973. The bionic wave; Dystopian cyborgs; Conclusions; Bibliography)
Rosa Barotsi, Spectral Robots: Disembodiment and the Border in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2009) and Mati Diop's Atlantics (2019)
(Robots? A century of cinema and the work myth; Sleep Dealer and cybraceros: "All the labour - without the worker"; Atlantics: dis/embodied labour organising and zombie care work; Conclusion: The disembodied worker and border fantasies of automation; Bibliography)
Alice Cati, Organic Artificial Flashback. How Humanoid Robots Remember in Contemporary Movies and Tv Series
(Towards extended memory: a premise; The flashback as a device for organic artificial memories; Conclusions; Bibliography; Filmography)
Maria Francesca Piredda, Robot Speeches: Sounds, Voices and Inflections in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema
(Distant voices; Electronic, synthetic, human: classifying the robotic voice; Loquor ergo sum; Bibliography)
Francesco Toniolo, Robots, Empathy and Trust in Video Games: two Examples
(Introduction; NieR: Automata; Mass Effect; Bibliography; Ludography)
Stefano Giovannini, From Mecha to Human Clone: the Anthropomorphic Robot in Exported Chinese Video Games
(Chinese video games' sociocultural impact on Western players' imaginary; The AR as a long-standing theme in Chinese SF (CSF); Games' selection; ARs in CSF video games; Conclusion " 144
Bibliography)
Contributors
Index.

Contributors: Rosa Barotsi, Alice Cati, Virgil Darelli, Ruggero Eugeni, Stefano Giovannini, Maria Francesca Piredda

Serie: Ricerche di comunicazione - Open Access

Subjects: Communication

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