On-Demand · A Cultural History of Robots: From Myth to Modernity with Cultural Historian Jason Lahman

Six session class via streaming video links
$120
Please note: Orders fulfilled weekly on Wednesdays

What does it mean to be alive? Is it possible to create life through artificial means? Humans have been creating objects mimicking living things for over 2,000 years although the word “robot” was only coined in 1920. In this course we will use an older term for these machines: “automaton”- ancient Greek for “self-mover.” As we will see, although the impulse to create artificial life has been with us for eons, the meaning of that activity (and the automaton itself) has changed dramatically over time and across cultures.

Starting with global myths of gods and magicians who made effigies walk and talk, we’ll discover the actual ancient technologies that brought such miracles to life through clever stagecraft and engineering. The cultures of Islam not only preserved late antique Greco-Roman texts detailing these secrets, but improved upon and added their own traditions of animated fountains, automatic musicians and mechanical animals. Chinese, Japanese and classical Indian technological histories will reveal the long lineage of Asian examples. We’ll look at medieval European clocks and cathedral organs that were filled with moving, dancing and singing automata! We’ll discover how Renaissance savants and Baroque engineers incorporated these technologies into stage-craft and war-craft and how the gardens and courts of the aristocracy used automata to entertain and to inspire awe.

During the Scientific Revolution, Rene Descartes adopted a mechanical model of the body. He postulated that animals were nothing but automata. In the 18thcentury several inventors such Jacques de Vaucanson and the Jacquet-Droz family attempted to simulate life through mechanism. During the Victorian Age, the traumas of the Industrial Revolution and the repetitive nature of factory work cast the automaton in a more sinister light. E.T.A Hoffmann and other Romantic writers exploited this new unease around the mechanized body in their fiction. We will end the course in the aftermath of the First World War, the coining of the word “Robot” by Karl Capek, and the dawning of the computer and cybernetic age!

Students will be invited to create a final project of their choosing related to the topic of automata or robots. Projects can be either in written form (essay, poem, short story etc) or be a personal art or technology project

Week 1: ROBOT THEORY AND ROBOT ORIGINS

• Introduction to the topic of artificial life and the methods of inquiry

• Theories of human response to robots

• The liminal, the uncanny and the double

• Are we all robots? World creation myths on the origin of life

• Classical myths and classical sources on automata

• Sacred machines of ancient Egypt and Alexandria

• The ancient engineers

• Byzantine shock and awe

• Automata in classical Islamic cultures

• The transmission and augmentation of classical technologies

• Automata and royal diplomacy

Week 2: ROBOTS EAST AND WEST/ ROBOTIC EXOTICISM

• The legendary and actual automata of ancient China

• Japanese automata of the Floating World

• Western vs Eastern viewpoints on the nature of robots

• The automata of Buddhism and classical India

• Techno-orientalism as history and as critical tool

• Robot as other: The exoticism of European automata

• The automata trade between Europe and China

Week 3: MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE AUTOMATA IN EUROPE

• Automata in the high medieval romances

• Mis/understanding automata in medieval science and philosophy

• The “invention” of the mechanical clock and its transformation of culture

• The moving allegorical figures on clocks

• Automata in churches and religious celebrations

• Renaissance engineers and ancient knowledge

• Automata in royal gardens, pageants and feasts

Week 4: CARTESIAN AUTOMATA & ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINES

• Early modern science and machine models

• Descartes and the beast-machine

• Hobbes & La Mettrie: the automaton state and automaton human

• Great automaton makers: Vaucanson, Jacquet-Droz, Cox

• Automata and spectacle: from royal court performance to public exhibitions

• “Aprés-moi les automates”: robot analogies of monarchists and revolutionaries

Week 5: THE ROMANTIC AUTOMATON & ITS INDUSTRIAL COUSINS

• The Chess-playing Turk and automaton trickery

• The automaton in Gothic and Romantic literature: Poe, Hoffmann and others

• Frankenstein, galvanism and historical wetware

• The Future Eve and new Pandoras

• The concept of the Unheimlich/uncanny

• The luxury trade in Parisian automata

• Automata on the stage: Robert-Houdin and the new techno-magicians

• Thermodynamic bodies and the industrialization of labor

• Artificial intelligence: Babbage and Lovelace and their predecessors

Week 6: THE ROBOT REVOLUTION IN THE CYBERNETIC CENTURY

• Capek’s “R.U.R”

• Lang and Von Harbou’s “Metropolis”

• The robot as Utopian and Dystopian archetype in the 20thcentury

• Mis/reading robots in the history of technology

• Grey turtles, mechanical mice and the cybernetic zoo

• Robot consciousness: more than we (can) know

• The mythology of the Singularity

• HOMO DEVS

Jason Lahman is an artist and cultural historian specializing in the history of technology, science and the occult. He has taught a number of classes for Morbid Anatomy including A Cultural History of Robots, A History of Fairies and The Femme Fatale.