Hybrid Workshop: Robots in Science and Fiction
When: 26 October 2023, 14:00 - 16:00 CEST (13:00 - 15:00 GMT) - hybrid event
Organised by the Center for Culture and Technology, University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Where: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense, DIAS Seminar Room
Zoom: https://syddanskuni.zoom.uk/j/67518128424?from=addon
No registration necessary, just join us on the day.
Program:
14:00 - 14:10 Opening remarks, Kathrin Maurer (Leader of the Center for Culture and Technology, Professor of Humanities and Technology)
14:10 - 14:30 Rune Graulund (Associate Professor, SDU)
The Humans Are Dead: A Century of Robot Imaginaries in Literature, Film, Television and Games
The talk will give a survey of robot and AI imaginaries in literature, film, television and games over the last one hundred years. While primarily an overview, the talk will also give some thought to different categories of "robot affect", including Robot Antagonism (both against and from robots), the AI-pocalypse (Westworld, The Terminator, The Matrix), the robot as friend and companion (Klara and the Sun, Machines Like Us) and the robot as racialized, classist, and/or gendered other (Blade Runner, Humans, Detroit 2077, The Windup Girl, Metropolis).
Bio: Rune Graulund is Associate Professor in American Studies and Culture at SDU and has published about the Gothic, the Anthropocene, and science fiction (Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
14:30 - 14:50 Kate Foster (ECR and Teaching Fellow in French Culture, Queen Mary University of London)
Biological Clocks and Women's Rights: Cyborg and Satire in 'Radium Age' Fiction
In E. V. Odle's The Clockwork Man (1923), a village cricket match is gate-crashed by a stranger who turns out to be a clockwork man from the year 8,000. Fed up with the violence and sexism of men, women of the future have insisted that all men receive a clock implant in their skull to regulate their behaviour. In this paper, I will explore how Odle uses the cyborg figure as a vehicle for social commentary on jey debates of the 1920s, including women's rights, productivity, and Einstein's relativity.
Bio: Kate Foster is an early career researcher whose research focuses on the intersection of human bodies and technology in early-twentieth-century France, Germany and Britain. Following the interdisciplinary conference 'Automation & Automatism/s' held in London in January 2023, Kate is currently developing an edited volume entitled Cultures of Automation.
14:50 - 15:10 Erik Granly Jensen (Associate Professor, SDU)
Pacifist Imaginaries: Paul Scheerbart's Lesabénido (1913)
In his 1913 sci-fi novel Lesabénido. An Astroid-Novel, Paul Scheebert (1863-1915) presents a utopian vision of emancipatory, technological infrastructures. In the paper presentation I will discuss this technological lifeworld within the framework of Scheerbart's overall pacifist writings.
Bio: Erik Granly Jensen is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Department of Culture and Language. Recent publications deal with the notion of infrastructural thinking in Walter Benjamin, Paul Scheerbart and Jules Verne.
15:10 - 16:00 Discussion
We look forward to seeing you there!
When: 26 October 2023, 14:00 - 16:00 CEST (13:00 - 15:00 GMT) - hybrid event
Organised by the Center for Culture and Technology, University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Where: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense, DIAS Seminar Room
Zoom: https://syddanskuni.zoom.uk/j/67518128424?from=addon
No registration necessary, just join us on the day.
Program:
14:00 - 14:10 Opening remarks, Kathrin Maurer (Leader of the Center for Culture and Technology, Professor of Humanities and Technology)
14:10 - 14:30 Rune Graulund (Associate Professor, SDU)
The Humans Are Dead: A Century of Robot Imaginaries in Literature, Film, Television and Games
The talk will give a survey of robot and AI imaginaries in literature, film, television and games over the last one hundred years. While primarily an overview, the talk will also give some thought to different categories of "robot affect", including Robot Antagonism (both against and from robots), the AI-pocalypse (Westworld, The Terminator, The Matrix), the robot as friend and companion (Klara and the Sun, Machines Like Us) and the robot as racialized, classist, and/or gendered other (Blade Runner, Humans, Detroit 2077, The Windup Girl, Metropolis).
Bio: Rune Graulund is Associate Professor in American Studies and Culture at SDU and has published about the Gothic, the Anthropocene, and science fiction (Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
14:30 - 14:50 Kate Foster (ECR and Teaching Fellow in French Culture, Queen Mary University of London)
Biological Clocks and Women's Rights: Cyborg and Satire in 'Radium Age' Fiction
In E. V. Odle's The Clockwork Man (1923), a village cricket match is gate-crashed by a stranger who turns out to be a clockwork man from the year 8,000. Fed up with the violence and sexism of men, women of the future have insisted that all men receive a clock implant in their skull to regulate their behaviour. In this paper, I will explore how Odle uses the cyborg figure as a vehicle for social commentary on jey debates of the 1920s, including women's rights, productivity, and Einstein's relativity.
Bio: Kate Foster is an early career researcher whose research focuses on the intersection of human bodies and technology in early-twentieth-century France, Germany and Britain. Following the interdisciplinary conference 'Automation & Automatism/s' held in London in January 2023, Kate is currently developing an edited volume entitled Cultures of Automation.
14:50 - 15:10 Erik Granly Jensen (Associate Professor, SDU)
Pacifist Imaginaries: Paul Scheerbart's Lesabénido (1913)
In his 1913 sci-fi novel Lesabénido. An Astroid-Novel, Paul Scheebert (1863-1915) presents a utopian vision of emancipatory, technological infrastructures. In the paper presentation I will discuss this technological lifeworld within the framework of Scheerbart's overall pacifist writings.
Bio: Erik Granly Jensen is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Department of Culture and Language. Recent publications deal with the notion of infrastructural thinking in Walter Benjamin, Paul Scheerbart and Jules Verne.
15:10 - 16:00 Discussion
We look forward to seeing you there!
Cultures of Automation: Call for Proposals for Book Chapters
Deadline: 31st October 2023
Following the interdisciplinary conference ‘Automation & Automatism/s’ held earlier this year, and preliminary discussions with a leading academic publisher, we seek literary oriented submissions for an edited volume, Cultures of Automation.
Automation, it seems, plays an increasingly significant role in our lives. From supermarket self-checkouts to chatbots, from factory robots to driverless cars, the automation of human tasks is all around us. We may worry what this means for us, that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost as we struggle to adapt to what feels like unprecedented technological change. But our relationship with automation is not a new one, as machines like windmills and steam engines have long been used to multiply human muscle power.
At the heart of this is the interface between human and machine. As machines automate progressively more activities once carried out by people, the human, one might think, risks becoming an obsolete category. Does the future of humankind lie in refashioning ourselves as ever-more machine-like, ever-more automated and unthinking? If an essential distinction between human and machine is conscious thought, when human behaviour is no longer motivated by consciousness what results is automatism. How might automatism trouble notions of agency in relation to the racial and class dynamics of labour? How has automation been reflected in and understood by literature?
We invite scholars and postgraduate researchers working in modern languages, literary studies, medical humanities, digital humanities, cultural studies and beyond to submit proposals for chapters of 6,000 – 9,000 words on topics including, but not limited to:
Automation and automatism in literature ~ AI, robotics and chatbots ~ Human bodies and automation/automatism ~ Reproduction, pregnancy, birth ~ Automated poetry ~ War and violence ~ Automatism and subjectivity ~ Mind-body dualism ~ Work ~ Repetition and automatism ~ Crowds and social interactions ~ Mimicry/doubling ~ Anonymity ~ Domestic automation ~ Literature and the machine
Please send abstracts of 250 words (max), together with brief biographical details, to:
Kate Foster (King’s College London) & Molly Crozier (University of Liverpool) at [email protected] by 31st October 2023.
Deadline: 31st October 2023
Following the interdisciplinary conference ‘Automation & Automatism/s’ held earlier this year, and preliminary discussions with a leading academic publisher, we seek literary oriented submissions for an edited volume, Cultures of Automation.
Automation, it seems, plays an increasingly significant role in our lives. From supermarket self-checkouts to chatbots, from factory robots to driverless cars, the automation of human tasks is all around us. We may worry what this means for us, that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost as we struggle to adapt to what feels like unprecedented technological change. But our relationship with automation is not a new one, as machines like windmills and steam engines have long been used to multiply human muscle power.
At the heart of this is the interface between human and machine. As machines automate progressively more activities once carried out by people, the human, one might think, risks becoming an obsolete category. Does the future of humankind lie in refashioning ourselves as ever-more machine-like, ever-more automated and unthinking? If an essential distinction between human and machine is conscious thought, when human behaviour is no longer motivated by consciousness what results is automatism. How might automatism trouble notions of agency in relation to the racial and class dynamics of labour? How has automation been reflected in and understood by literature?
We invite scholars and postgraduate researchers working in modern languages, literary studies, medical humanities, digital humanities, cultural studies and beyond to submit proposals for chapters of 6,000 – 9,000 words on topics including, but not limited to:
Automation and automatism in literature ~ AI, robotics and chatbots ~ Human bodies and automation/automatism ~ Reproduction, pregnancy, birth ~ Automated poetry ~ War and violence ~ Automatism and subjectivity ~ Mind-body dualism ~ Work ~ Repetition and automatism ~ Crowds and social interactions ~ Mimicry/doubling ~ Anonymity ~ Domestic automation ~ Literature and the machine
Please send abstracts of 250 words (max), together with brief biographical details, to:
Kate Foster (King’s College London) & Molly Crozier (University of Liverpool) at [email protected] by 31st October 2023.