MESH#8/9 Autumn/Winter 1996 ‘Robotica Special Issue’. MESH film/video/multimedia/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts

Microscope Phakomètre/ Epanaphoroscope Phlatergometre(1)

`….A piece many years in doing, and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano; who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer.’ – William Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale, Act v, Scene ii.

The history of anthropomorphism in the design of robots is as venerable as the history of realism and naturalism in visual representation – for it is part of the same history. To make a picture or statue so `close to life’ as if it breathed and felt human passions is a myth that has inhabited human culture for millennia, even if the precise conditions of its humanity are subject to specific cultural forms and contexts, ranging from animistic totemism to Western cinematic visions of cyborgs and androids, from Easter Island to Cape Kennedy. This is a sweeping claim, intended in no way to recall von Daniken or Velikovsky, but it seems undeniable that the manufacture of human likenesses has a deeply significant role in human culture, across a variety of cultures (even when, for instance, likenesses are forbidden as idolatrous) and a variety of times (from the unknowable depths of prehistory, imagined through its relics, to the prognosticated future, which is a measure of what can be imagined). Within this broad spectrum of events and reasons lies a principle of embodiment: images of the human body are ways of envisioning the self and others, and the practice of figuring insensate material in human form participates in this complex discourse in a variety of political and ideological manners.

Taken from this perspective, the history of robotics is firmly entrenched in culture, as much a consequence of scientific development, the changing relationships of labour in society, mythologies of progress and utopian and dystopian romances, as it is a mythos drawing upon fundamental notions and practices of carnality and gender, desires of reproduction and sexual/biological appropriation:

`…Shakespeare {in A Winter’s Tale} gave an altogether new twist to the myth of a statue quickened and to its usual import, that males can control and own their objects of desire, generated through art. He turns the story inside out, to show a woman exercising control of her own significance in the eyes of others. Hermione, reified by Leontes as a fallen woman, daughter of Pandora and Eve and Helen, consigned to Otherness, can step out of the illusion of art into the autonomy of existence, and there – although Hermione herself is still bounded by the illusion of Shakespeare’s play itself – can begin to control herself as subject matter. This reversal of the customary use of personified desires, in statues or other images, is entirely characteristic of Shakespeare’s breadth and the generosity of his imagination, as he inhabits his heroines’ spirit. Hermione and Paulina are unusual, but not alone, in turning the language of art to their own advantage, which in their case coincided with the service of truth.’ (Warner,233:1985)

The point made here by Warner is that the object of desire, the `statue quickened,’ can refute the desires that circumscribe it, and move beyond the illusions of realism/naturalism into a realm of autonomy. Metaphorically, of course, the statue quickened can be seen as the anthropomorphic robot in its various forms (androids, gynoids, cyborgs, replicants and so forth), and it presents precisely the same issues of autonomy as the myths of Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet subtending this idea is a transparent notion of anthropomorphism: that an object, in order to be anthropomorphic, must conform to human proportions, anatomy and physiognomy. Furthermore, this entity, whilst autonomous, is apart from the self of its creator (in these myths, generally male) but embodies all the desires of that figure. More often than not, as in Frankenstein, the tale of autonomy is a tale circumscribed by the relentlessness of the passions that sought such reification: painful, often destructive separations and loss, where the hubris of egomaniacal construction of an other (as a lover, child or monster) is more often than not repaid by death or bitter solitude.

In this sense, then, the robot-other is often envisaged as a moral and philosophical object: on one hand a nemesis because of its origins in `unwholesome’ lusts (e.g. the Monsters of the Id in Forbidden Planet; the Children of Rage in Cronenberg’s The Brood), on the other a doppelgänger that merely seems to embody human qualities, but is essentially unknowable or evil (e.g. HAL in 2001, the Terminator, the clockwork doll Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffman’s Der Sandmann). But this conceives of the robot as a form of cultural symbol, somehow distinct from ourselves because it is (still) largely imaginary. Perhaps the most under-examined aspect of (anthropomorphic) robotics is its pivotal role in the development and history of technology and automation: this is especially pertinent given the prominent status of `techno-theory’ and the somewhat fluffy arguments about the `post-human body’ that are floating around at the moment.

Discussions about technology tend to neglect the fact that pop-up toasters are technology, as are clothes, sunglasses, knives and forks and a myriad other `invisible’ objects. These objects form the technological horizon of human experience, so often taken for granted that they do not enter into the debate about how technology is shaping culture – and the fact that many of these transformations are not so recent:

`In household production too, as elsewhere, we have shown a tendency to use time freed by labor-saving machinery not for more leisure, but for more goods or services of the same general character. The invention of the sewing machine meant more garments, for a time garments on which there was an enormous amount of sewing – tucks, ruffles and so on. The invention of the washing machine has meant more washing, of the vacuum cleaner more cleaning, of new fuels and cooking equipment, more courses and elaborately cooked food.’ (Kyrk,99:1933)

This observation attests to common experience: you own a car and soon spend a life of indentured labour cleaning and fixing it, replacing parts and working hard enough to pay the insurance. The `bedroom on wheels’ instantly becomes a representation of the self: the technological object is profoundly invested with a set of cultural and personal meanings, as well as becoming personified and developing character (how many cars have names?) But on another, very important level, the machine modifies our experience of bodiliness, as Anthony Vidler, commenting on Sartre, remarks:

`I live my body in danger as regards menacing machines as well as manageable instruments. My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body {Vidler’s emphasis}. This is why my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I lean against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole house; for it is my adaptation to these tools.

In this way Sartre rejects a classical notion of embodiment that then projects itself into the world as a mode of apprehension or control of the external environment. Instead, he poses our original relation to the world as the foundation of the revelation of the body; “far from the body being first for us and revealing things to us, it is the instrumental-things which in their original appearance indicate our body to us.” “The body,” he concludes, “is not a screen between things and ourselves; it manifests only the individuality and the contingency of our original relation to instrumental-things.”‘ (Vidler,1992:81)

From this perspective, that of an existential phenomenology (articulated by such thinkers as Hegel, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and, more contemporarily, Donna Haraway and Manuel de Lanza), the body is already disposed (as soon as it is born) into a world of instrumental-things. Technology precedes the body, and the self develops within an already extant and ineluctably internalised `regime of equipmentality.’ This argument inevitably leads one to question ideas of embodiment and notions of anthropomorphism if they assume a kind of Cartesian dissociation between self and instrumental-things. The body, after all, is not separate from its actions in the world, nor the apparatus by which it enacts: technological objects, even of the most apparently simple nature, a priori conform the conditions of human experience. One might ask when the last time was that anyone went for a naked romp in a forest in a state of Arcadian undress.

With this in mind, arguments about the post-human body become somewhat problematic (was there ever a pre- human one?): they are reliant upon a myth of technology as other to the self: as somehow being incorporated by infection, elective surgery or invasion (e.g. nanotechnology, William Gibson-like prostheses, breast implants); or as X-Men-style mutations, supported by a dubious neo-Darwinism that regards evolution itself as having become a tool or functional process of technological progress. Evolution is not so partisan – it was Darwin’s conception of its inhumanity and oceanic timelessness that makes it such a remarkable insight.

This aside, the relationship between embodiment and technology can be seen to be an extremely complex one, both philosophically and politically. The issues raised by robotics, machine intelligence, cybernetics and information processing are vitally poised around the question of what is to be human: as cultural representations they picture irrational fears and utopian clarity; as technological and scientific enterprises, efforts of genuine altruism and spectacular achievement as well as problematics in, for example, the redundancy of labour and personal disenfranchisement. These seem to me to be the far more pressing issues raised by emergent technologies, rather than convenient arguments about technophobia and post-human evolution. Here, there are many histories to be written in the manner of, to paraphrase Simon Schama, a `cultural psychology of technics,’ where technological objects and practices can be viewed with a necessary critical ambivalence and an awareness of historical significance and precedence. This seems to me to be important, on one hand because of the increasing interfusion of the `two cultures’ (`Science’ and `Art’), where both must (and always have) walk hand- in-hand, and because of the irritatingly disingenuous view that they are somehow antagonistic:

`One widespread folk-tale is cast as a riddle: a woodcarver carves the doll, a tailor makes her clothes, and a gardener gives her speech, to whom does she belong?’ (Warner,1985:229)

© Peter Morse, Melbourne, 1996.

Peter Morse is co-curator of Robotica Exhibition (with Shiralee Saul) and curator of the Robotica Screening Program