Bugs After the Bomb: Insect Representations in Postatomic American Fiction and Film.

As cold-blooded invertebrates which more often provoke disgust than delight, insect tend to be overlooked within animal studies in favor of warm-blooded beings in whom it is easier to perceive expression of emotion more “like ours.” Since insects and other arthropods are often conceived of as smaller, “lower,” and more “simple” forms of life, they are thought of as more like machines than animals, lifeless automatons that react to the world with blind instinct rather than agential beings who respond to the world with proclivities and inclinations all their own. This dissertation examines how such a view of insects and other bug-like creatures embodied cultural anxieties about postatomic life in 20th century North American literature, film, and culture. I coin the term “insectoid figuration” to expand beyond Linnaean classification to account for the more affectively motivated layperson’s categorical understanding of “bugs” in order to argue that insectoid figuration became a powerful political register for articulating concerns about American social order, language, dehumanization, and xenophobia. I bridge critical animal studies, materialist feminism, affect theory, and posthumanism to reveal how humanism depends upon abjection of animality by espousing exceptionalist views of human affective capacities. The various insectoid figurations which I explore in this dissertation—the bevy of mutated, big bugs which stomped across the celluloid screen in the 1950s; the centipede as an agent of viral control in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and other cut-up experimentations; the femme fatale gynoid modeled on insect mimicry and praying mantises in Philip K. Dick’s dystopic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; the Oankali, an insectoid alien species which seeks genetic trade with humans in Octavia E. Butler’s speculative trilogy Lilith’s Brood—shuttle between the literal and figurative, the material and semiotic, encompass a range of affects and anxieties, and ultimately form a signifying constellation which lays bare shifts in how American social order was conceptualized after the chaos of World War II and in the aftermath of atomic potentiality especially in response to severe environmental degradation.PhDEnglish and Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133284/1/cscassel_1.pd

Puppets between human, animal and machine: towards the modes of movement contesting the anthropocentric view of life in animation

In this PhD thesis, I challenge animation studies’ conventional notion that animation can bring something inanimate to “life”. This emphasis on animation’s capacity to make a figure appear to move on screen has led to the problematic notion that movement has a synonymous relationship with life. Contesting these discourses, I show in this thesis that not every animated figure suggests the impression of life. In order to prove this, I put forward as a critical focus the puppet-as-puppet figure, that is, the figure of a puppet depicted as a puppet per se in the film diegesis, which problematises the impression of life even if appearing to move on screen. A related focus in my thesis is the mode of movement which functions as a visual and physical parameter in order to analyse what an animated (or static) figure is intended to look like, instead of reducing it to a question of life. Through case studies of these puppet-as-puppet figures, which I classify into four groups, I examine the varying ways in which they are depicted as inanimate or sub/nonhuman, even when in human form, in contrast to human or (anthropomorphic) animal figures, both in terms of their mode of movement as well as their appearance. Examining how these depictions demonstrate anthropocentric views of puppets, I consider religio-philosophical, scientific and aesthetic discourses on puppets and human/animal simulacra. Further, I explore a selection of puppet-as-puppet figures as alternatives to these anthropocentric conventions, examining their defamiliarisation of the animating human subject’s mastery over the animated non/subhuman object, and the non-anthropocentric sensations which their movements arouse on screen in the relationship between humanity and materiality

Metamorphoses of the Pygmalion Myth in French Literature 1771 – 1886

Writers have long explored and attempted to portray the visual artist’s challenge of creating the ideal in the real world through art. My thesis asserts that the Pygmalion myth, originally told in written form in Ovid’s 8 A.D. Metamorphoses, is the quintessential model to explore the changing, and sometimes problematic, relationships between the artist, the creation, and the creative process. The three main characters in the Pygmalion myth – the sculptor, the sculpture, and the divine intervention – each appear, albeit in different manifestations, in its later adaptations. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in French literature, authors explored this tripartite relationship in their texts. I claim that the retellings in my corpus attest to a renewed interest in Ovid’s myth at a time when ideologies and conceptions about the creative process underwent significant changes. Plato’s conception of the ideal in The Phaedrus and The Republic serves as a grounding for each of my texts. I begin my examination with an exegesis of the Pygmalion poem in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Chapter two explores the creation theme at the heart of Pygmalion’s quest in eighteenth-century theater to indicate the point at which French literature saw a marked increase in Pygmalion adaptations. Here, I introduce L’Amante statue (1774) and La Fausse statue (1771) into the Pygmalion corpus. Looking at the ways in which the creator figure attempts to control the potential of the ideal object through destructive means, I turn to nineteenth-century fantastic short stories in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1837) and Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831/7). A final chapter reveals how innovations in technology and artifice aid the artist in reconstructing the ideal in two decadent novels: Villiers’s L’Eve future (1886) and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884). This dissertation will contribute to nineteenth-century French literary studies and eighteenth-century theater as well. Adding criticism of two eighteenth-century plays to the already significant body of Pygmalion retellings underlines the myth’s renewed popularity at the time. Each chapter examines these adaptations as part of a greater metamorphosis of the Pygmalion story itself. From creation to destruction to reconstruction, the creator figure adapts - with varied results - to a changing artistic, technological, and cultural environment

Machine Performers: Agents in a Multiple Ontological State

In this thesis, the author explores and develops new attributes for machine performers and merges the trans-disciplinary fields of the performing arts and artificial intelligence. The main aim is to redefine the term “embodiment” for robots on the stage and to demonstrate that this term requires broadening in various fields of research. This redefining has required a multifaceted theoretical analysis of embodiment in the field of artificial intelligence (e.g. the uncanny valley), as well as the construction of new robots for the stage by the author. It is hoped that these practical experimental examples will generate more research by others in similar fields. Even though the historical lineage of robotics is engraved with theatrical strategies and dramaturgy, further application of constructive principles from the performing arts and evidence from psychology and neurology can shift the perception of robotic agents both on stage and in other cultural environments. In this light, the relation between representation, movement and behaviour of bodies has been further explored to establish links between constructed bodies (as in artificial intelligence) and perceived bodies (as performers on the theatrical stage). In the course of this research, several practical works have been designed and built, and subsequently presented to live audiences and research communities. Audience reactions have been analysed with surveys and discussions. Interviews have also been conducted with choreographers, curators and scientists about the value of machine performers. The main conclusions from this study are that fakery and mystification can be used as persuasive elements to enhance agency. Morphologies can also be applied that tightly couple brain and sensorimotor actions and lead to a stronger stage presence. In fact, if this lack of presence is left out of human replicants, it causes an “uncanny” lack of agency. Furthermore, the addition of stage presence leads to stronger identification from audiences, even for bodies dissimilar to their own. The author demonstrates that audience reactions are enhanced by building these effects into machine body structures: rather than identification through mimicry, this causes them to have more unambiguously biological associations. Alongside these traits, atmospheres such as those created by a cast of machine performers tend to cause even more intensely visceral responses. In this thesis, “embodiment” has emerged as a paradigm shift – as well as within this shift – and morphological computing has been explored as a method to deepen this visceral immersion. Therefore, this dissertation considers and builds machine performers as “true” performers for the stage, rather than mere objects with an aura. Their singular and customized embodiment can enable the development of non-anthropocentric performances that encompass the abstract and conceptual patterns in motion and generate – as from human performers – empathy, identification and experiential reactions in live audiences

Mental State Attribution to Robots: A Systematic Review of Conceptions, Methods, and Findings

The topic of mental state attribution to robots has been approached by researchers from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. As a consequence, the empirical studies that have been conducted so far exhibit considerable diversity in terms of how the phenomenon is described and how it is approached from a theoretical and methodological standpoint. This literature review addresses the need for a shared scientific understanding of mental state attribution to robots by systematically and comprehensively collating conceptions, methods, and findings from 155 empirical studies across multiple disciplines. The findings of the review include that: (1) the terminology used to describe mental state attribution to robots is diverse but largely homogenous in usage; (2) the tendency to attribute mental states to robots is determined by factors such as the age and motivation of the human as well as the behavior, appearance, and identity of the robot; (3) there is a computer < robot < human pattern in the tendency to attribute mental states that appears to be moderated by the presence of socially interactive behavior; (4) there are conflicting findings in the empirical literature that stem from different sources of evidence, including self-report and non-verbal behavioral or neurological data. The review contributes toward more cumulative research on the topic and opens up for a transdisciplinary discussion about the nature of the phenomenon and what types of research methods are appropriate for investigation

Friend or foe?:on the portrayal of moral agency of artificial intelligence in cinema

Abstract. This thesis explores how movies portray AI characters’ moral agency. Moral agency is a term that is used when a person or an entity is capable of moral reasoning performing moral acts. For an agent to be able to perform moral acts it must possess self-conscious awareness and exhibit free will and understanding of moral meaning. A theorietical background of artificial intelligence, moral agency, free will, and the semiotic hierarchy is provided in order to familiarize the reader about the core concepts of the thesis. Semiotic hierarchy provides a theory on meaning making and defines and explains the different levels or requrements involed in meaning making. There are four levels to the semiotic hierarchy: life, consciousness, sign usage and language. Three movies were chosen for the research: I, robot (2004), I am Mother (2019) and Ex Machina (2014). All three movies depict artificial intelligences in various narrative roles and present unique portrayals of the moral dimensions that are involved in creating artificial moral agents. The movies were chosen based on the criteria that the movies have an artificial intelligence that is capable of moral agency and is mobile to some extent. The AIs must also depict various stages of semiotic hierarchy. From each movie notable moments of moral agency and narrative significance are first identified and explained. After this the movies are analysed using content analysis. Two tables of codes were constructed from the data. The first table explores how the characters exhibit e.g. free will, moral agency and semiotic hierarchy, and is constructed by deriving codes from the theoretical background. The second table explores e.g. the narrative role of the AIs and the main moral acts performed by the AIs, and its codes are derived from the movies. These tables allows for an easy comparison of the movies and help identify similarities and differences between them. After analysing the two tables a third table was constructed that divides the AI charaters in two groups: morally justified and morally unjustified, based on similarities the characters share with each other. The morally unjustified AI characters had a notably large influence sphere with multiple active units (drones or robots), based their morality on utilitarianism and were motivated by creating a better, more just world for humans. The morally justified AI characters were all single units, acted based on their self-interest, and were capable of emotions. The former groups moral agency was depicted as a threat and the latter groups moral agency was mostly depicted as a neutral occurence. Additionally, all AI characters advanced on the semiotic hierarchy in a reverse order, meaning language was the easiest level for the AIs to perform. Notably, no AI character was considered to be “alive”. Lastly, a brief discussion is had about the advancements and problems in AI creation by providing real life examples of AIs that have been a topic of discussion in the media in recent years.Ystävä vai ei? : tekoälyistä ja heidän moraalisesta agenttiudesta elokuvissa. Tiivistelmä. Tässä gradussa tutkitaan, miten tekoälyjen moraalinen agenttius käy ilmi elokuvissa. Tekoälyt ovat jo nyt pysyvä osa elämäämme, ja niiden kehitys jatkuu huimaa vauhtia. Niiden moraalisuus, ja etenkin moraalinen agenttius, on kuitenkin vielä vähän tutkittu aihealue. Materiaaliksi valittiin kolme elokuvaa: I, Robot (2004), I am Mother (2019) ja Ex Machina (2014). Gradun taustatutkimukseen käytettiin monipuolisesi filosofisia teorioita kuten semioottinen hierarkia, vapaa tahto ja moraalinen agenttius. Tutkimuksen metodologiaksi valikoitui laadullinen sisältöanalyysi (eng. content analysis), jonka avulla elokuvista identifioitiin kahdenlaisia koodeja: taustatutkimukseen pohjautuvat koodit ja elokuvista esiin nousevat koodit. Nämä koodit jäsenneltiin kahteen taulukkoon, joiden avulla elokuvista löytyviä kohtauksia ja piirteitä pystyttiin vertailemaan keskenään. Taulukoiden vertailusta syntyvän näytön perusteella tekoälyt pystyttiin jakamaan kahteen kategoriaan: niihin, joiden teot olivat moraalisesti oikeutettuja, ja niihin, joiden teot olivat moraalisesti epäoikeutettuja. Epäoikeutetut tekoälyhahmot perustivat moraalisen ymmärryksensä utilitarismiin, pystyivät hallinnoimaan useita yksikköjä eli drooneja kerralla, eivätkä ilmaisseet tunteitaan tai antaneet tunteiden vaikuttaa heidän moraaliseen päätöksentekoonsa. Heidän moraalinen toimintatilansa oli myös laaja, jonka vuoksi he pystyivät tekemään päätöksiä, jotka koskettivat suuria ihmismassoja kerralla. Merkittävintä oikeutetuissa tekoälyhahmoissa oli heidän tunnekykynsä ja se, että he kokivat maailman ihmisenä, eivätkä robottina. Nämä tekoälyt myös hallinnoivat vain yhtä yksikköä kerralla. Tutkimuksen lopussa mainitaan, miten tekoälyjen inhimillistäminen näkyy jo monissa paikoissa. Esimerkiksi Googlen luoma Lamda-keskustelurobotti oli niin vaikuttava, että eräs sen kanssaan työskennellyt tutkija väitti sen omaavan “sielun”. Koska oikean elämän tekoälyn ja tieteisfiktion välinen kuilu on kuroutumassa umpeen teknologian kehittyessä, on tärkeää tutkia, miten reagoimme tekoälyn moraalisuuteen elokuvien ja median kautta

Perceiving Sociable Technology: Exploring the Role of Anthropomorphism and Agency Perception on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

With the arrival of personal assistants and other AI-enabled autonomous technologies, social interactions with smart devices have become a part of our daily lives. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to understand how these social interactions emerge, and why users appear to be influenced by them. For this reason, I explore questions on what the antecedents and consequences of this phenomenon, known as anthropomorphism, are as described in the extant literature from fields ranging from information systems to social neuroscience. I critically analyze those empirical studies directly measuring anthropomorphism and those referring to it without a corresponding measurement. Through a grounded theory approach, I identify common themes and use them to develop models for the antecedents and consequences of anthropomorphism. The results suggest anthropomorphism possesses both conscious and non-conscious components with varying implications. While conscious attributions are shown to vary based on individual differences, non-conscious attributions emerge whenever a technology exhibits apparent reasoning such as through non-verbal behavior like peer-to-peer mirroring or verbal paralinguistic and backchanneling cues. Anthropomorphism has been shown to affect users’ self-perceptions, perceptions of the technology, how users interact with the technology, and the users’ performance. Examples include changes in a users’ trust on the technology, conformity effects, bonding, and displays of empathy. I argue these effects emerge from changes in users’ perceived agency, and their self- and social- identity similarly to interactions between humans. Afterwards, I critically examine current theories on anthropomorphism and present propositions about its nature based on the results of the empirical literature. Subsequently, I introduce a two-factor model of anthropomorphism that proposes how an individual anthropomorphizes a technology is dependent on how the technology was initially perceived (top-down and rational or bottom-up and automatic), and whether it exhibits a capacity for agency or experience. I propose that where a technology lays along this spectrum determines how individuals relates to it, creating shared agency effects, or changing the users’ social identity. For this reason, anthropomorphism is a powerful tool that can be leveraged to support future interactions with smart technologies

"Narratives of Technological Globalization and Outsourced Call Centers in India: Droids, Mimic Machines, Automatons, and Bad 'Borgs"

Taking as a premise that contemporary communication and information technology-aided globalization is a world-making practice that relies on narratives to construct and transmit global imaginaries and relational identities, this project evaluates narrative discourses of Indian call centers serving clients and customers in the United States in order to analyze evolving hegemonic narratives of the "global" of late capitalism. In this project, I argue that constellations of local, national, and transnational hegemonies map outsourced Indian call centers into a position in capitalist geography at which vectors of the production of national, corporate, and racial identities converge in the technological production of power. Specifically, I look at assemblages of narratives corresponding to four tropes that metaphorize Indian tech workers as machines--the oriental droid, the mimic machine, the productive automaton, and the bad 'borg--how each metaphor is reinforced by labor processes in the call center, and how these are assimilated into new forms of subjugation to further extend and entrench participation in zero-sum economics across the globe