Welcome Performing Objects: Puppets, Robots, Automata Class 2011

Hello all,

Welcome, welcome, welcome to our automata blog site for this year’s class! I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts and to our course in general.

all the best,
Kara

Delegating the Human(e) responsibility

Although I enjoyed the play R.U.R on the whole, I found its resolution somewhat unsatisfactory. Although ultimately he posits the victory of humans over machines by triumphing human emotions over the soul-less machines, the implication is still that the robots ‘adopt’ elements previously reserved for humans, and therefore implying that eventually robots will be able to adopt an element of human ‘agency’ as Jane Goodall puts it. This idea, I feel, is further enhanced by the fact that the robot at the end of the play is named after the main female protagonist in the play ‘Helena’ who technically predicts her fate of essentially becoming a robot at the beginning of the play when she can’t distinguish between the human scientists and the robots.

The dominating theme of the play is the idea that human existence could eventually become rendered useless  by the mass production of robots, at a cheap rate who can do physical ‘jobs’ at a pace and cost far lower than the human labourer incurs. Thus, as Sian says, the play incorporates one of the central issues discussed on the course of the higher efficiency and skill of the machine compared to humans.  The fact that Capek has also expressed these fears through the medium of drama could be seen as ironic because he is conjugating the ‘idea’ of robots taking the place of humans with the acting theory of ‘mimesis’ and therefore visually demonstrating how easy it is to copy, or replicate humanity.  The fact that Capek portrays these robots as evil, killing machines quite clearly expresses a fear of being replaced by machines; he clearly sees them as a threat.  This is unsurprising given that the play was written just after the First World War; the first war where machines were used and the war with the highest recorded number of civilian deaths, thus it seems logical to link the theme of human redundancy within the play with the feelings of human annihilation that were a result of the war.  I also wonder whether, the fact of the holocaust brewing was what gave Capek his initial ideas of this ‘perfect’ yet soul-less race trying to wipe out the lesser, yet humane race.

In its entirety however, I believe the play should be read as a warning: by imagining a kind of ‘utopia’ where humans no longer need to work, we would be subverting the necessities of a democratic system’ whereby progress is achieved through hard work and accomplishment.  The robots are in the play not only to show that an over dependency on machines could be humanity’s enemy but also to show how out of control the world, and the human race could become if we neglect our ‘duties’…if we become lazy.  Instead of achieving the utopia he intended, Domin ends up creating a dystopia; a war against humans bought upon them by themselves purely in their efforts to try and avoid the graft needed in order to live harmoniously on earth.  Particularly in connection to the event of the war, Capek, I believe is trying to reinforce the fact that the world is not ‘easy’ there is no easy way to be successful, although it is possible, it involves hard work, and by neglecting our humane duties; to work well with one another, the world will become a state of war and destruction.

Although I disagree with the fact that at the end of the play, the characters should be happy when they have submitted to the idea that we share similarities with humanity, on a much deeper level I believe that Capek is trying to show how sharing the responsibility of the human race, and incorporating each other’s differences into our lives can only lead to a much more fruitful environment.

Zoe

R.U.R and things that have come up before.

Firstly, i would like to apologise to everyone for the lateness of my blog, unfortunately i have been ill but i hope that this will make up for it.

The great thing about Rossum’s Universal Robots was that seemed to portray a lot of the issues and ideas that we had discussed in the light of previous reading, in this way i felt that it really helped to consolidate a lot of the work we have done throughout the term.

To begin with,  i would like to discuss the concept of perfection. As we have spoken about in pervious lectures and in many of our blogs, humanity sees itself as the highest being on the planet. We consider ourselves to be superior to animals, plants and machines, all of which are to differing extents alive due to outr emotional, intellectual and creative drives. The problem with this, a problem which R.U.R picks up on very well, is that human beings are not deities, we are not perfect. Thus there is a constant struggle to create perfection. In R.U.R we see that humanity is not the ideal worker, humans need to sleep, eat and have regular breaks, all of which mean that they can not work continually, their human frailties slow down production. Robot workers are therefore created as a more efficient alternative, they are better than us at working and within the play replace us in that sphere. This seemingly ‘out there’ concept is in fact the mirror of real life. The loom, for example, and the printing press all replaced human workforces and did the job much more efficiently. Industrialisation was simply the replacing of human workers with machines that did the same function but better. Humanity, consequently, in its imperfection had to aim to re-establish itself as the ideal by trying to bring itself closer to the perfect mechanised system e.g. construction lines in a factory, in which each human carries out one repetitive task to create something and then passes it on rather than creating the whole to increase efficiency.

Form and the illusion of humanity is another big issue raised by R.U.R. The robots are built like humans but without all the unnecessary bits, such as emotion. They have a heart, bones and skin amongst other things and, despite the fact that they are made our of a different material to human tissue, they are initially mistaken by Helena for humans. The question here again is, if something appears human, who can deny it humanity? At the end, the robotess Helena and robot Primus go out to repopulate the world because they are in love, here, though they are robots, they are so alike humanity that they have, in essence, become human. This stimulates something that we have discussed in class previously, the fear of replacement. Thinking about it now, i have come to realise that it is not really our fear of being replaced that incites our hatred of things like robots or cloning, rather it is the fear that our replacement will be better than us. It is a fear that we will become obsolete, useless to the world or, even worse, that we are inferior to the replica of ourselves. To be lower in the pecking order when we are so used to considering ourselves as on the top of the pile would diminish us to nothing in our minds. Our egos cannot even contemplate this possibility, even now, writing this, knowing that women were at one point considered an inferior subspecies of the male, I, myself, cannot accept this possibility.

The last thing that i would like to discuss is the uncanny. I would definitely argue that the robots in R.U.R are uncanny. Firstly, they have the form but not the emotions of humanity, thus they have no conscious, which is unsettling to people brought up in the human world, where morals are emphasised from an early age. Secondly, during the revolt, two points are made about the robots which surround them with an eerie aura.

‘They’re standing like a wall around the garden railing. Why are they so quiet? It’s ghastly to be besieged by silence.’

Here the character Dr.Gall is pointing our the uncanniness of the robots. even where a large group of humans vocally silent, they would still make some level of noise. Human’s need to fidget, even simply shifting the weight from one leg to another when standing is required to provide the muscles with some relief. A machine, however, does not tire and it does not therefore need to fidget. The true stillness of something that looked like a mass of humans in a complete prolonged silence would therefore be distinctly unnerving as the familiar becomes strange.

Gall also says;

‘We made the robot faces too much alike. A hundred thousand faces, all alike, turned in this direction. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. It’s like a nightmare.’

Here is the 3rd point of uncanniness, the idea we discussed in the last class of the Doppelganger. As humans, we like to think ourselves as unique and, as our appearance plays such a large role in our own perception of ourselves, the idea that we could meet someone who looks like us (a Doppelganger) is unnerving. Therefore the final uncanny impression of the robots in R.U.R is provided by the fact they the robots look so alike, and at the same time look so human, thus the implication is, that all of humanity is alike and that individuals are not ‘special’.

Fear of Machines

As I am writing my essay on R.U.R. I am a little nervous about stepping on the toes of my essay in this weeks blog. As a result I decided to focus more on the fear of machines as it remains today in Literature.

There is no doubting that Karel Capek’s play is the birth of the modern conception of robot. Aside from actually introducing the word robot into western lexicon it also gave birth to the idea of intelligent, human like, artificial life built to serve man as slaves without personal wants or needs. It very much signalled a shift in focus, in literature at least, as to what an automaton’s purpose is within our lives.  It could also be seen perhaps as the literary birth of Artificial Intelligence.

In modern literature robots, and artificial intelligence as a whole, are often seen as antagonists. Although Isaac Asimov wished to change this when he wrote his Three Laws of Robotics:

“…one of the stock plots of science fiction was… robots were created and destroyed by their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings? With all this in mind I began, in 1940, to write robot stories of my own — but robot stories of a new variety. Never, never, was one of my robots to turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#History_of_the_Laws

The loose film adaptation of his short stories, in the 2004 film I, Robot, however showed how even these laws could be manipulated to turn robots against their masters. The supercomputer VIKI attempts to become the despotic ruler of all the Earth in order to ensure that humans do not break the first rule of Robotics.  Much like in R.U.R. robots are shown to be the antagonists and the enemy of humans.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey a similar situation occurs. HAL 9000 believes that the humans pose a risk to the success of the mission and so decides they must be terminated. HAL 9000 and VIKI both act perfectly logically acting entirely on a perfectly sensible course of action based on probabilities and a ranking of importance of life and duty to a set of paradigms they must obey.

Another act of violence against humans by an artificially created intelligent supercomputer takes place in James Cameron’s The Terminator. In the films the computer system Skynet becomes self aware and proceeds to plunge humanity into nuclear war and then a systematic genocide of the survivors. Although it acts in a similar way to both VIKI and HAL Skynet probably most closely resembles the robots in R.U.R. than the others. Whereas VIKI and HAL were acting out of a sense of duty and logic Skynet’s reasoning could almost be seen as emotional. It is expressly stated that the humans attempted to pull the plug on Skynet when they realised it had become self-aware and it was out of an act of self-preservation that Skynet declared war on humanity. The robots in R.U.R., whilst not acting out of self preservation, were acting out of a desire to be more than just slaves, they wanted to experience more than just servitude which is an emotional response. Skynet’s actions are the most directly antagonistic towards humanity; there is no attempt at rationalisation from Skynet, “it cannot be reasoned with” (that quote is actually referring to the Terminator itself though can equally be atributed to Skynet also) and it is acting purely out of self defence much like a cornerned animal. It is the most emotionally driven response of these three examples.

One recent exception to the concept of robots explicitly rebelling against their masters is in Stepehen Spielberg’s A.I. whereupon a robot acts in response to the emotion of love rather than any other. A.I. in many ways seemed much more disconcerting than the despotic and violent actions of HAL,  Skynet and VIKI as this particular emotion is seen as an essence of humanity. The Uncanny nature of the robot boy who can feel love is much more fear inducing as it suggest humans being replaced in a subversive manner, rather than in a violent one which can be overturned as in the other examples. Unlike in 2001 and I, Robot (the Terminator is less clear since that seems to be self preservation) the machine is not acting on cold hard logic or a sense of duty but out of genuine human emotion; and that can, for many people, be disturbing.

Will H

PS. Sorry this is so late I thought I’d clicked post but apparently not.

haphazard

‘The ideal’ was a theme I felt that ran through all of this week’s reading. It was stretched to the idea that perfection is only achievable when no longer human. For Kleist, a dancing puppet can exceed what any human dancer can achieve, for Craig the uber-marionette should replace the individual/actor as a symbolic human figure that is without the ‘weakness and tremors of the flesh’ (81). Both points of view see emotion as an obstruction to the mind’s control over the body, which can only be executed perfectly without the “haphazard” influence of emotion. In R.U.R, the original robots are more efficient than humans because they do not feel emotion, they are even unable to understand the concept of death.

I found it helpful to understand the Craig extract by comparing it to Diderot’s Paradox. The issues discussed in both these texts are similar, both touch on the question: to what extent is the actor really feeling the emotion experienced by the character they are portraying? I am reminded of a something I learnt last year, which is that the history of theatre splits broadly into three phases: 1. “characterised by the operations of conventionalism”, 2. “the cultivation of illusion” and 3, “the contestation of illusion”. The actor/character relation in the first phase, which includes Medieval and Elizabethan theatre, is described like this: “the spectator perceives a real actor, and is impelled by textual and performance conventions to imagine an ‘imaginary’ character. The spectator is in creative allusion with the dramatist and actor towards a more complete realisation of the text.” This is a type of theatre in which the Paradox as described by Diderot does not exist because he was writing at the beginning of the next phase, of illusion. He is aware and commenting on this change in his discussion of Shakespearean language, saying: “Cleopatra…would make a sorry figure in history; they would raise laughter in society. People would whisper…in what world do people talk like this? And why are they not intolerable on the stage? Because there is such a thing as stage convention…it is a protocol three thousand years old. And will this protocol go on much longer? That I cannot tell you.” (22) Diderot concludes that the great actor can train his body to portray the illusion of emotion without feeling a thing. Craig, writing in 1907, is on the cusp of the third phase, and for this reason is preoccupied with the same things as Diderot, examples such as this: “emotion works upon the voice of the actor, and produces the impression of discordant emotion”(Craig 57) reveal a still unresolved definition of a working emotion and the impression of one. He does however identify the conventions of illusion that have created this contradiction and is insistent in his rejection of them as a corrupting view of what theatre is: “If there is any actor who is reading this, is there not some way by which I can make him realise the preposterous absurdity of this delusion of his, this belief that he should aim to make and actual copy, a reproduction?” (Craig 64)

Marxist criticism would have connected the process of industrial capitalism with the history of western culture (as it corresponds to the phases of theatre) in which the body is objectified and seen as a ‘material’. Craig refers in particular to the actor as an instrument: “The young man appears before the multitude and speaks the lines, and the speaking of them is a superb advertisement for the art of literature…After the applause the young man is swiftly forgotten…but…the author found it profitable, and shortly afterwards other authors found it an excellent thing to use handsome and buoyant men as instruments. It mattered nothing to them that the instrument was a human creature” (60). It is the body and its automatic mechanisms that fail us in the end: “there has never been an actor who reached such a state of mechanical perfection that his body was absolutely the slave of his mind” (67) In fact, Craig makes a point about this contradiction being peculiar to western ‘art’ : “all the intelligent men and women of Europe – one does not speak of Asia, for even the unintelligent in Asia fail to comprehend photographs while understanding art as a simple and clear manifestation – have protested against this reproduction of Nature, and with it photographic and weak actuality” (81). The Artaud quote I included in a past blog is perhaps even more relevant here than where I put it, because Craig’s modernist approach holds many similarities with Artaud’s, who was similarly inspired by Eastern ritual and stylistic theatre.

To finish, I’m really pleased that others have picked up on the gender representations in RUR because it means I can raise a few ideas: Any power Miss Helena Glory has is because of her beauty as a young unmarried eligible ‘Miss’. By act two she is ‘Mrs Domain’ and continues to be defined against the male. She is one of only four representations of women, as opposed to nine representations of men, which is perhaps illustrative of the condensed possibilities for women to define themselves. Her actions always stem from the social constructions of the maternal, such as her initial interest in the human rights of the robots and their souls. Her one powerful action is the burning of the old documents (a bit hedda gableresque?) but her reasons for this action are not rationalised, she does it overcome with emotion, making it a weak action when juxtaposed against Domain’s ruthless rationality. The robotess Helena might as well be considered as the same character (I wonder if they could be played by the same person in performance?), the Eve parallel is present in more than the last five mins of the play because it was Helena who persuaded the doctor to make some robots with souls, or to tempt them with knowledge. Robotess Helena’s character representation is the same as Helena’s, in many ways she serves the same function: to inspire the men with her outward appearance and her maternal and impetuous performance towards Primus when she combs his hair, but not her rational mind. She is described as “lovely, but quite stupid. Simply no good for anything” (47), until of course she can be a mother. These are character traits that reflect stereotypes of the time, that empowered women only when they perform in roles of appropriate femininity. A thought to end: “Helena: How terrible. It’s scandalous! Domain: Why scandalous? Helena: It is of course it is. Why did you call her Sulla. It’s a man’s name. Sulla was a Roman General” (14) it is easy to forget the extent to which gender is inscribed into something as everyday as your name.

The blurring of humanity and robotics

The ideas that really struck me and made me think in regards to this weeks reading were that of; humanity and robotics almost blurring into one another. Rhi, in her blog, discusses R.U.R and says that the robots in the play are too human-like, to the point where it is difficult to distinguish between humans and robots. I thought this was really interesting when reading the article, ‘On the Marionette theatre’ – when he talks about the puppets dancing. I thought this was interesting because in the article he says that: Herr C- ‘assured him that the pantomime of these puppets gave him great pleasure, and emphatically remarked that a dancer who wished to develop himself could learn a number of things from them.’ I find this quite ironic because I have always thought of automaton to be representing humans and how they move, think act – and for Herr C to say that a dancer should take influence from the puppets seems almost a reversal of ideas. Does this then constitute simulacrum and the copying and copying of images?

I’m not sure if I am using ‘uncanny’ in the correct way when i say this, however; I think that it is uncanny how it appears that humans and automatons are so reliant on each other and quite fundamentally similar in some cases however, in the real world, today’s world, most people wouldn’t think of humans as automaton – and as said in a previous class it could be seen as an insult to describe someone as a ‘machine’. A nice example of automata and humans being reliant on each other from the play, is when Alquist is trying to recreate the human formulae but all of the human’s have been wiped out and so will the world survive on the existing robots with no building of new robots?

The confusion and uncertainty that we sometimes hold about an object being real or an illusion is fascinating and made me think of ‘War Horse’ that I went to see a few months ago (which Lizzie has already mentioned!). War Horse is a production about the horses that died in the war, and primarily a puppet and physical show. The puppets that were used in the show were so lifelike and incredibly enchanting to watch, so much so, that I forgot that they were puppets. I think the reason that the horse puppets were so engaging to watch was because their movements were very rhythmic and natural; this was obviously controlled by a human – so why did i lose ability (for a short amount of time) to recognise that it was only a puppet? How does the representation of the real have the power to suspend disbelief?

 Abiex

Progress, like R.U.R?

Firstly, I’d just like to begin with: I loved R.U.R! Upon reading Capek’s R.U.R and the other two articles, I was interested to think on the topic of whether progress towards a greater technological world, where there is a development of robots, is needed, or whether we are attempting to progress an imperfect society unnecessarily, as surely evolution will continue to drive out these apparent imperfections, if we let it? Why then, do we attempt to play God ourselves and twist nature, when it could all turn back on us as shown through Capek’s play?

The story of R.U.R focuses on many things that I worry about regarding the so-called ‘progression’ of the human race and its development of artificial life. For this reason, Capek’s focus on the creation of life and the difficulties this can cause ensured that the play was one which I could identify with. In the play Capek highlights the initial development of the robots and the reasoning behind this move to ‘perfection’. Domain explains to Helena the ways in which Rossum thought that man had too much to do, think and feel; “A working machine must not want to play the fiddle, must not feel happy… the process must be of the simplest, and the product of the best from a practical point of view… he [Rossum] rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. In this way he rejected everything that makes man more expensive… he rejected man and made the Robot.” (page 9) This explanation is fascinating as it describes man’s attributes, and individual qualities that set us apart from other species, as seemingly too complicated because we, as humans, have too many qualities? We can argue then that in Rossum highlighting that he rejects everything that doesn’t contribute directly to work; he rejects part of mankind, thereby creating a clear divide between the humans and robots in the play. Furthermore, Fabry’s remarks on page 21 that “Nothing is more unlike a man than a robot… the human machine…was terribly imperfect. It had to be removed sooner or later”, effectively raises the issue of progress and makes us question whether it is inevitable?

This rejection of mankind’s attributes is shown through the lack of emotion had by the robots. For example, when Sulla is asked what she feels about death and other issues, she can only reply “I cannot tell” (page 13). This lack of emotion once again demonstrates my argument, previously raised in my blogs, for there needing to be a definite sense of feeling felt by a robot for them to be compared to a human.  It would appear that Rossum’s robots are manufactured initially not to feel, and only to work, understand orders and therefore serve a purpose. Yet, their appearance is seemingly human-like, shown through Domain’s request that Helena touch the manufactured skin of their creation. It made me question why, if Rossum thought there to be so many imperfections with humans, why would he model the robots on humans so much so that Helena confuses the robots to be humans and humans to be robots?

Capek also highlights how the development of the robots is unnerving. For example the initial description of the factories and machines which make the robots; “What spinning-mill?” “For weaving nerves and veins. Miles and miles of digestive tubes pass through it…” (page 15) For me, the idea of constructing artificial nerves and veins through spinning them through a machine is immoral. Furthermore, Capek’s description of how the robot’s faces all look too similar is unnerving. This is mentioned when the robots have surrounded the house, creating a barricade in Act III. The appearance of these ‘expressionless bubbles’ all staring at Domain and everyone else is indeed equivalent to a nightmare, for this lack of expression means that there is no sign nor indication of the imminent attack. There is just silence – and it is therefore perhaps the inability to show these emotions that makes the robots so frightening towards the end of the play?

The idea that progression will occur is a scary thought, as from reading Capek’s play, you can only think of what if it all goes wrong? What if we start off small, through the development of artificial limbs? (as mentioned in On the Marionette Theatre), yet from this we continue to develop new ways to ‘perfect’ humanity, each time thinking it is progression, yet each time we are heading slowly but surely towards the destruction of humanity as we know it? (dramatic I know!) So is progression good? The play has me a little worried that this will be our future.

Jenny

Robot Wars

My focus is on the play RUR. Along with everyone else I am quite surprised by the advanced content and nature of the play. Firstly through the use of the word “robot” which was coined in this play and by the moral discussions it brings up, that are very relevant to our society now. This seems to be the first time in automata that automatons or robots are actually mistaken for humans so explicitly. Usually there are signs that lead to the uncanny affect (in last weeks discussion), where it is so close to reality but just misses it, making it all the more scary (like the reference to the eyes). With the emotional technology of the robots and the fact that they are biological machines, with livers etc. – it seems the only difference between a human and a robot in this play is that they are assembled rather than born. This small fact seems to give the humans justification that they are not at all alike and that robots are merely soulless creatures.

This obsession with creation that, predominately male, humans seem to have, has brought forward a few questions. Are these creations a way of humans progressing? In the play it is obvious that progression is made because the economy gets better through the diligence of the robot work force and the world becomes more efficient. However, is this actually helping the human’s progress? They will just do less and less, maybe become more ignorant of life and in the end not progress at all, but in fact digress. This reminds me of WALL.E when all the humans are sitting in a little spaceship bubble, relying entirely on computers, and are all morbidly obese! Man’s relationship to technology and their increasing reliance upon it is something which can be seen as a potential threat to humanity in the play. It seems, however, that these are very extreme stories and that in reality that would never really happen. But I don’t think I have that much faith in humanity to see scientists stopping, when they have a technological break through even though it might be detrimental to other people’s lives.

This leads me to another point. Has this not already occurred? Capek wrote the play in 1920s very shortly, only a few years in fact, after the First World War. This is a prime example where technology was used even though it was seriously detrimental to other people’s lives. It was the first time that machines had created such desecration on such a large scale. However, it also created an unnatural environment for the soldiers too. The soldiers acted as machines, given orders, fighting for king and country, without any allowance for moral decisions or free will. In fact soldiers have become even less than that. Since the First World War warfare has becoming more technological, more “progressive” and at the same time more destructive. A soldier on a battlefield at the end of the twentieth century counts for even less than the soldier of the First World War, making even less of an impact, than the machines they work with. War has now just become a battle of the machines.

In an article by Patrick Wright (http://www.patrickwright.net/books/tank/about/) he talks of tanks in the First World War and how the tank first emerged in 1916 to meet the requirements of the immobilised western front. But they became less of an instrument of war but more of an interesting concept for humans. “They were gendered – categorised as male or female according to their weaponry”. Not only was the tank helpful, it also signified a comfort, “The symbolic impact of the tank – it was called ‘the moral effect’ in the early days – remains essential to its operation, and not just in peace-keeping operations”.

Another thing that occurred to me in the creation of these perfect robots, is that we are simply trying to create a better version of ourselves all the time. Like the flute player that was mentioned in one of our articles earlier in the term, it needed to play better and so skin was added to the fingers, so it played more like a human. However, if this was the case, then why do we set these “wonderful” creations to do all the menial tasks in our lives? Maybe even these robots, even though they can feel emotion and pain, still harp back to the first point made in automata, that they are just an extension of us.

Back to the obsession of creation by the male. As Jo pointed out, women seem to be stereotyped, as we discussed in the lecture, as just being blank pretty faces. However, when the robots are created in the play they do not have the ability to reproduce, which then becomes a major problem for them when the formula for a robot is destroyed and all the humans are dead. However, doesn’t this just highlight the major importance of women? They give birth and essentially give life. So maybe the role of women in the play is bigger in the play than we at first realise.

The search for perfection

What interested me in this week’s reading and what point I’d like to talk about in this week’s blog is the human need to strive for perfection. It seems to be evident in much of the reading we have looked at in the past weeks. These creators are seeking, it seems, to create something superior to a human. We see ourselves as imperfect and are constantly reminded of our limits. Automata, machinery, robots etc give the creator an opportunity to create something that doesn’t have these imperfections and ultimately attempt to create something that it superior to man. However it seems that this cannot be achieved. We have all discussed how even though the automata that are created are scarily life like, there is always something missing. Be it in the eyes or the movements something is not quite right.

 It is the same with the robots created in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots. They are held up to be perfected workers who do not have the “unnecessary” traits of humans that get in the way of efficiency. However they are lacking a soul or any emotions to speak of. We also see that in the end they cannot survive without humans and do have limits too. They are not in any way perfect as their creators had hoped them to be. They are too efficient in their work, there is “no more room to store what we have made”. Another interesting point is that Radius also states that the robots: “wanted to be like human beings. We wanted to become human beings.” they are not happy with their apparently “perfect” state.

In On the Marionette theatre the way in which the marionettes are held up as perfection is interesting. They will never make any mistakes as they do not have the influence of the “soul”. I found this quite hard to grasp, I myself would find that there was something missing to a performance that was constantly the same and too perfect. There would be something missing. It is as though in our striving for perfection there is always something that is not quite right. It begs the question then can anything ever be completely perfect? Especially if it is made by imperfect beings? Do we actually know what perfection is?

Jo G

Zoe’s Post

There is currently a programme running on bbc iplayer called ‘why beauty matters’ wherein a philosopher Roger Scruton examines the importance of beauty in art and our lives.  It was a statement he made ‘all art is created in the persuit of perfection’ which really captured me in relation to our discussions in class regarding whether humans create machines as a way of trying to resolve the imperfections of the human condition.

In this light then, I wonder whether machines can be viewed as pieces of art.  In the opera version of tales of Hoffmann, Olympia could certainly be considered to be a piece a piece of artwork in this light, although her composition is ugly-and eventually exposed as springs and wooden limbs, Hoffmann is captured by her ethereal beauty: to him this automaton represents his idea of the perfect woman.  The fact that the automaton of the woman is used in an opera lends itself further to the idea of it being a work of art.  Perhaps this is why watching the doll perform in the opera aroused feelings of ‘uneasiness’ or ‘eeriness’ in certain members of the class.  Because, if we interpret this woman performing as a doll as a form of artwork, we are suddenly confronted with the notion of having to contemplate the idea of a human being imitating something which we would normally consider as being ‘inhuman’ or a mere object, thus the boundary between what is real and what is false is immediately blurred in the act of a human being acting like a (traditionally) inanimate piece of artwork.

According to Freud the reason for us feeling this way could be connected to his theory on the ‘uncanny,’ the nearest English translation to the German ‘Un-heimlich’ or ‘Un-homely.’  According to Freud-‘The uncanny is in some ways a species of the familiar.’He goes onto say ‘We have particularly favourable conditions for generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate, and whether the lifeless bear an excessive likeness to the living.’  This is particularly relevant in relation to the character Olympia, where the audience’s sense of uncanny is channelled via Hoffman’s inability to distinguish the doll from a real human.  His emotional attachment to the automata further blurs the boundary between the real and the unreal because it suggests it is possible for a human being to fall in love with an inanimate object.  This could suggest further reasons for feelings of the uncanny towards automaton due to the fact that our emotional capacity can make us vulnerable to emotional pain arising from loving something that does not have the emotional capacity to love us back: in Hoffmans case, he was loving what he thought was human; what aesthetically represented a human but was not even alive.

The idea that humans might create machines out of their own persuit of perfection could suggest that they put into the machines elements of the human being.  I believe this notion could be what lies at the crux of our uneasy feelings about seeing a machine or automaton such as a robot or a doll which resemble humans-the fact that they seem (in appearance) similar to us, but yet we share no sense of empathy with them, making them appear to be figments of a distant memory.  Freud also talks about the ‘doppelganger’ and the fact that we create ‘doubles’ as a way of repressing fears of death.  Perhaps seeing these ‘dead’ imitations of ourselves which appear to be so vacant of life subconsciously make us think of death, or extinction, thus further producing feelings of anxiety.

Ultimately, by inferring that Machines or robots could be regarded as works of art, i am trying to put forward the idea that in these creations, the human creator puts their own ideals and so therefore a part of themselves and this part of ‘humanity’ injected into the machine could be what raises feelings of the uncanny, because we see this notion of ‘familiarity in them…this notion of the living in the lifeless.