Trauma and digital media: Introduction to crosscurrents special section

Associations between trauma and media theory are longstanding, going back at least to Walter Benjamin’s observations on technology and modernity, which were themselves informed by Freud’s 1920 speculations on war trauma following WWI. A century later, and in the wake of numerous conflicts, catastrophes, and far-reaching technological transformations—and of course the COVID pandemic—it is time to reconsider the relation between trauma and media, digital platforms in particular. While some significant scholarship has noted the intersections of modern media technologies such as photography, film, radio, television, and recently digital and algorithmic media, with the conception and experience of trauma, a more systematic theoretical consideration of the relation between media and trauma remains to be developed. And with the intensifying reliance on new and old media in these pandemic times the question of these relations is increasingly urgent. Moving beyond conceptions of media as representing or inducing trauma, this special section of Crosscurrents explores how (digital) media and trauma shape one another

Re-evaluating the Form and Communication of Social Robots: The Benefits of Collaborating with Machinelike Robots

This paper re-evaluates what constitutes a social robot by analysing how a range of different forms of robot are interpreted as socially aware and communicative. Its argument juxtaposes a critical assessment of the development of humanlike and animal-like robotic companions with a consideration of human relations with machinelike robots in working teams. The paper employs a range of communication theories alongside ideas relating to anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in discussing human-robot interactions. Some traditions of communication theory offer perspectives that support the development of humanlike and animal-like social robots. However, these perspectives have been critiqued within communications scholarship as unethically closed to the possibilities of otherness and difference. This paper therefore reconfigures and extends the use of communication theory to explore how machinelike robots are interpreted by humans as social and communicative others. This involves an analysis of human relations with Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots and with the robotic desk lamp, AUR. The paper positions social robotics research as important in understanding working teams containing humans and robots. In particular, this paper introduces the value of tempered anthropomorphism and zoomorphism as processes that support communication between humans and machinelike robots, while also ensuring that a sense of the otherness of the machine and respect for its non-human abilities is retained

Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.

Creative Collaborations with Machines

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. This paper analyzes creative practice including virtual music composition by a human and sets of computer programs, improvisation of music and dance in human-robot ensembles, and drawings produced by a human and a robotic arm. In all of these examples, the paper argues that creativity arises from a process of human-robot collaboration. Human influences on the machines involved exist at many levels, from initial creation and programming, via processes of reprogramming and setup of underlying data and parameters, to engagement throughout the process of creative production. The decision to value a machine as a creative other is supported most strongly when collaborating with the machine directly, while witnessing the creative team at work, as opposed simply to seeing the result, is more likely to bring an audience to a similar understanding. The creativity of the human-machine collaborations analyzed in this paper relies on close interaction, within which there is a continual recognition of the otherness of the machine and its nonhuman abilities. Such relations can be theorized by extending Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the face-to-face encounter within which self and other are brought into proximity, but the alterity of the other is nonetheless retained. The paper’s analysis of creative interactions between humans and robots supports the idea that machines need not be regarded as challenging human artistic practice, but rather enable new ways for creativity to arise through human-machine collaborations within which human and nonhuman creative abilities are combined