198 research outputs found

    Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

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    What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

    The Alexa Experiment

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    "The Alexa Experiment" is an autoethnographic and performative project which explores living with the artificially intelligent home assistant, the Amazon Alexa. This Experiment evaluates the device outside of intended consumer uses in hopes to understand who is Alexa? “The Alexa Experiment” is a time-based document, chronicling our journey together, which reports discoveries over an eight-month period. This text is accompanied by a mini-documentary detailing pivotal moments with the device and surveillance footage of private interactions, demonstrated through feminist performance art techniques. This paper critically unpacks the Alexa as a creature, a friend, a surveillance object, and a mirror for self-analysis. Finally, I look at Alexa as a subject, landing on ‘who’ she is through interviews with the device, by leveraging Jacque Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, “The Mirror Stage.

    Communication Robot: Animating a Technological Solution in Twenty-First Century Japan

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    Present-day Japan is marked by two associated problems: the social problem of communication and connection and the economic problem of labor shortage. The social problem of connection, which emerged in the 1990s, was originally thought to be centered on disconnected, lonely, anxious, and sometimes violent youth, but by 2010 the middle-aged and elderly were also found to be suffering from isolation and loneliness, as seen by the increase in the number of single-person households, declining marriage rate, and the resultant declining birthrate. The latter demographic reduction, combined with the aging population, creates population decline that directly causes an insufficient labor force. Because this labor shortage is understood as a serious problem in Japan, the government is trying to implement a variety of solutions, one of which is to increase robotics. In 2014, a Japanese telecommunications conglomerate announced the release of a friendly communication robot, Pepper, as the all-in-one technological solution to both of these problems. This dissertation examines how friendly communication robots like Pepper make sense as a solution to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortage in contemporary Japan. The acceptance of this solution is rooted in the historical development of the notion of technology in Japan (from the early modern Tokugawa to the postwar eras), combined with the postwar popular cultural development of the figure of a robot in manga and anime. Accordingly, Japanese society is both familiar and comfortable with the widely shared image of the robot whose defining quality is its convincing quality of humanity. Communication robots—specifically, the communication robot Pepper—are thus developed as both as technological objects and animated characters in mass media; their presence in the daily lives of humans bridges the limited present technologies with the future potential imagined in popular culture through expectation management. For most of the general public, Pepper exists as an animated character, modeled through its interactions with celebrities on TV. In addition, owner–users of Pepper, and other people in business and social settings, interact with Pepper as an animated character whose personality [kyara] is modeled on the personalities of popular media stars. Such playful and entertaining interactions reflect the cultural logic of Japanese TV production and become a playful buffer [asobi] for the Japanese to face problems, but may not provide real solutions to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortages. Nonetheless, the material presence of Pepper is capable of functioning as a reflexive tool for app developers (many of whom are also owners/adopters) to reflect on their own biases and assumptions about communication, culture, and technology. By oscillating between the established animated character and the blank machine, Pepper functions as a medium by which people engage in meaning-making, negotiating the solutions to the problems. Doctor of Philosoph

    The posthuman : hostis humani generis? : science fiction allegories/social narratives

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    Whether in the guise of the novel or non-print media such as film and television, fin-de-millennium science fiction has provided opportunities to envisage a posthuman stage of evolution. The academic response to this has been polarized. Certain elements have embraced the genre as integral to the sociocultural relationship between unfettered biotechnological advance and the limitation of the human flesh. Others have treated the topic as fanciful entertainment, leading them to ignore and sometimes ridicule research on the posthuman. The thesis seeks to utilise the contemporary science fiction allegory as an aid in developing a critique of the emerging posthuman discourse, facilitating the analysis of its socio-political dynamic, and questioning whether discourse advancement necessitates the rejection of the humanist metanarrative. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter differentiates the posthuman from established biotechnological discourses, e mg the discontinuities in global location, temporal engagement, and participant ideology. The second reflects on the contemporary human condition associated with man's technological ingenuity being a credible threat to his own existence. It then outlines the epochal technoscience of the posthuman and introduces the diametrically opposed standpoints of the posthuman as amelioration, or autoextinction. The third chapter draws upon utopian visions of the future to contextualise and assist in the critical analysis of narratives advocating posthuman technoscience. The fourth chapter reverses this, by utilising dystopian imagery as an entree into the rationale of those opposing human alteration, facilitating its critique. The fifth chapter sees the science fiction allegory as a postfoundationalist narrative, offering up a discursive mirror to the influences of providence and progress on the posthuman debate. The final chapter examines whether an a-humanist account of man's relationship with technology might help to advance the posthuman debate

    Digital Transformation in Media and Society

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    Excavating the Future

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    Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS

    Gurus and Media: Sound, image, machine, text and the digital

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    Gurus and Media is the first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion. Illuminating the mediatisation of guruship and the guru-isation of media, it bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs and more. The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship, and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of ‘absent-present’ guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste and Hindutva. Throughout, the book foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, the book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly

    Selected tales from decentralized finance

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    Doutoramento em Sociologia EconĂłmicainfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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