The old doom of a new technology
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The old doom of a new technology Danila Bertasio1 Received: 5 March 2020 / Accepted: 29 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Although robots are largely designed with industrial, scientific or military aims in mind, many designers seek to endow them with anthropomorphic forms, even at the risk of compromising their functionality. Why do they not content themselves with constructing useful machines, rather than also incorporating human-like features? What drives them to cover their machines with a latex coating to simulate human skin? The utopia of the creation of a double appears also in the world of art, the history of which shows, above all, an outcome that coincides with the abandonment of the naturalistic imperative, and the inauguration of various periods of exploration and innovation. That is why a possible roboaesthetics—i.e. robotics and aesthetics combined could give rise to a new scenario. This view would acknowledges the radical novelty of these ‘species’ and induce the adoption of a new observation level, constructed on the basis of a common project. Keywords Imitation · Art · Robotics · Roboaesthetics · Natural · Artificial
1 The Utopia of the double The propensity to give an anthropomorphic look to various classes of things, be they manmade or from the natural environment, is very ancient, and is in a sense a predisposition of our species (Duffy 2002). In this section, we shall see how this is true in the history of human attempts to ‘reconstruct’ the human body, sometimes even trying to assign a sort of ‘personality’ to the creations. With the construction of automata, mankind creates a projection of his own nature, generating artificial objects sometimes marked by remarkable success, but often doomed to an inevitable failure. For example, the use of wax—a malleable material par excellence—has been proposed as an expressive modality in the art world since the thirteenth century. Wax figures made a particular impression on Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century painter, architect, writer and historian (Vasari 1991, p 230), who saw them in the workshop of Andrea Verrocchio, a fifteenth-century sculptor, painter and goldsmith. Yet they achieved rather limited success, presumably owing to the ambivalent effort * Danila Bertasio [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali, University of Parma, Via M. D’Azeglio, 85, 43125 Parma, Italy
to surpass the limits of symbolic representation only to reach and remain at the level of a most uncompromising and somewhat disquieting realism. Subsequently, the unnerving wax—which, while capable of fooling the eye, also celebrated death—was replaced by ever-more-refined materials and technologies, enabling the construction of automata that seemed to give the illusion of transcending the very limits of man’s physical existence. Indeed, the step from wax statues to automata is shorter than one might think. Julius Schlosser, in the fourth chapter of his His
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