Digital Peeps 2: Robots, Automata, and Androids in Popular Art

The second of three posts that offer some key moments and images in the history of non-human humanoid entities: artificial intelligence, androids, robots, cyborgs . . . We'll talk about these as begin to discuss Metropolis, but they're posted here now to encourage ideas for your "My Frankenstein" project.

Hephaestos, the Greek god of the workshop--the artificer--

was lame--like Rotwang and Dr. Strangelove

Talos, the living bronze statue of Greek mythology,

as imagined by Ray Harryhausen in his 1953 film,

Jason and the Argonauts 

The Golem (1926)
We'll see this big fella again when we consider
the Frankenstein theme in film

Perkowitz emphasizes that the Creature in Mary Shelley's novel serves as a projection of our concerns about our own humanity:
1) Frankenstein as a myth for a post-theological age -- as one stage version
of the novel had it, "Life Without Soul"
2) Science as Modern Sorcery - Electricity as Magic
3) the fantasy of utter alienation -- psychologically the condition of
coming into being without a Mother
We might add particularly: 4) the psychosexual basis for the fantasy of the creation of life without procreation
5) a deep concern about mortality and immortality

The first robot? A scene from the original production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.

R.U.R.

More about her later 
 

Elektro and his robot dog Sparko

Pinocchio’s now a boy

Who wants to turn back into a toy . . .
-Rufus Wainwright

Forbidden Planet: Robby the Robot with his creator Morbius

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Gort, the robot from outer space,
sent to enforce worldwide peace with the threat of
total annihilation 

 

Audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland

Star Wars: C3PO and R2-D2 

HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nothing more 
than a light and a very creepy voice.

Blade Runner: Rachael, a replicant

RoboCop

RoboCop: The ED-209

The Terminator: A human face

The Terminator: The machine beneath the skin

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data, a fully functional android with a positronic brain

Digital Peeps - Part One: Before Modern Artificial Intelligence

The first of three posts that offer some key moments and images in the history of non-human humanoid entities: artificial intelligence, androids, robots, cyborgs . . . We can discuss these as we begin to discuss Metropolis, but they're posted here now to encourage ideas for your "My Frankenstein" project.

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement.

-Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709-1751), Man a Machine Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782)

Vaucanson’s duck

Vaucanson and his remarkable automata

Video of a contemporary replica of Vaucanson’s duck (at the Museé des Automates de Grenoble)

When first presented to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1928, the automaton was of unknown origin. Once restored to working order, the automaton itself provided the answer when it penned the words "written by the automaton of Maillardet". – Wikipedia

The Jaquet-Droz Automata - a very detailed webpage

Automotamania – For all Your Automaton-Restoration Needs Maintains great images and videos

The Turk – not an automaton but a hoax: a man hidden inside played chess

The Turk at Wikipedia

Charles Babbage, the father of computing, at Wikipedia

Babbage’s Difference Engine was not constructed during his lifetime but replicas were later made. It's also the subject of a collaborative novel by the cyberpunk pioneers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), “the first programmer”

Alan Turing (1912-1954), who proposed the “Turing test” for artificial intelligence, and the man behind the Enigma machine, which is said to have won World War II. 

Soon to be a major motion picture! Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.

"The Metropolis Case" (2003) part 2

"The Metropolis Case" (2003) part 1

This documentary, accompanying the 2003 Kino DVD release, provides an introduction to Metropolis in the context of German film. We'll look at part of it in class, but it's well worth seeing in its entirety.

On Dr. Strangelove - Yes, Wikipedia is a terrible resource for real scholarly work but let's face it, sometimes it provides a useful quick introduction IF you don't take it too seriously

From the Wikipedia article on the film: Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread Cold War fear for survival. While doing in-depth research for the planned film, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "Balance of terror" existing between nuclear powers and its intrinsically paradoxical character. At Kubrick's request, Alistair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George. Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer, and immediately bought the film rights. Kubrick, in collaboration with George, started work on writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn. In following the tone of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. However, as he later explained during interviews, the comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction became apparent as he was writing the first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question. After deciding to turn the film into a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian (1959), which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers. Sellers is also sometimes considered an uncredited co-writer, as he changed many lines by way of improvisation.




The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting to footage of nuclear explosions, but it was originally intended that the film would end with everyone in the War Room involved in a pie fight, and this scene was filmed.
Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said: "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Alexander Walker observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at." Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggests that the fight was intended to be less jovial. "Since they were laughing, it was unusable, because instead of having that totally black, which would have been amazing, like, this blizzard, which in a sense is metaphorical for all of the missiles that are coming, as well, you just have these guys having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of Homeric proportions.'"
. . . .
Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at numerous Cold War attitudes, such as the "missile gap", but it primarily focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to be deterred by the fact that a nuclear war would be a cataclysmic disaster for both sides, regardless of who "won". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War used the concept of a doomsday machine in order to mock mutually assured destruction; in effect, Kahn argued, both sides already had a sort of doomsday machine. Kahn, a leading critic of American strategy during the 1950s, urged Americans to plan for a limited nuclear war, and later became one of the architects of the MAD doctrine in the 1960s. The prevailing thinking that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable and suicide was illogical to the physicist turned strategist. Kahn came off as cold and calculating; for instance, in his works, he estimated how many human lives the United States could lose and still rebuild economically. This attitude is reflected in Turgidson's remark to the president about the outcome of a pre-emptive nuclear war: "Now I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops!" Turgidson also has a binder which is labeled "World Targets in Megadeaths".
Many have compared the portrayals of Ripper and Turgidson to the fiery Air Force general, Curtis LeMay, and many of his direct subordinates who openly lobbied for war with the Soviet Union.
. . . .

Also see:

Dr. Strangelove fan site

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Trailer

New York Times critic A. O. Scott introduces Chris Marker's La Jetee