Week 3: Robotics and Art

     This week, we read about how industrialization has enabled art to be easily mass produced and distributed to more people than ever before. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin argued that because of industrialization, art had lost its "aura"-- with the ability to easily mass produce copies, the value of the original has diminished. While I feel that, as Douglas Davis wrote in his essay, this didn't exactly happen, I do feel while the great artists of the past still command respect by common people even today, who go out of their way to see their work in person even though they could just as easily view their work for free on the Internet, modern artists generally operate in obscurity to anyone not in the art world. Common people are often flabbergasted by the amount artists charge on their commissions, thinking, "Well, it's just drawing, how hard can it be?" With industrialization and the inception of so many more tools to create and reproduce art, it certainly seems that people perceive the visual arts, at least, with much less respect than they did before.

    The other main theme of this week was robotics. Of particular interest to me is how the attitudes towards robotics in Japan differ so much from attitudes in the West. I find the idea that Japanese religions that posit spirit existing in all things being part of Japan's more friendly attitude towards robotics very interesting. The difference is stark between robots in Japanese fiction like Doraemon and Astro Boy, who are charming companions, and robots in Western media like the Terminator and the Matrix that are killers and dictators. 

Doraemon, robot from Japanese media Taken From Wikipedia

The Terminator, robot from American media Taken from Wikipedia

 

   Robotics is a particularly interesting aspect of technology to incorporate into art as it forces us to reckon with the definition of humanity and our own identity. The example of Hiroshi Ishiguro's geminoid certainly forces us to consider just how much an entity's appearance affects our feelings and our instinctual positioning of it in moral and emotional space. The robotic works of artists like Ken Feingold and Gijs Van Bon are uncanny and eye-opening. And as a sci-fi fan, I can't not mention the robots in Isaac Asimov's books. As they question and test the limits of their strict Three Laws of Robotics, we must consider the laws we ourselves operate on and whether they contain similar limitations. 

Isaac Asimov's robots. Taken from classicsofsciencefiction.com

Works Cited:

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (an Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, p. 381., doi:10.2307/1576221.

van Bon, Gijs. Gijs Van Bon, www.gijsvanbon.nl/. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

Feingold, Ken. Ken Feingold, http://www.kenfeingold.com/ Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

Kusahara, Machiko. "Robotics MachikoKusahara 1." Youtube, 14 Apr. 2012, https://youtu.be/xQZ_sy-mdEU Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

Image Credits:

“Doraemon (Character).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Apr. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doraemon_(character). Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

“The Terminator.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Apr. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.

Harris, James Wallace. “Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov.” Classics of Science Fiction, 29 Dec. 2019, classicsofsciencefiction.com/2019/12/29/robot-visions-by-isaac-asimov/. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.