Week 3: Robotics + Art

This week’s assignment had us retracing the steps all the way back to the beginning of the industrialization era and even the printing press. Ford who started the assembly line provided so many people jobs although it was tough manual labor. Then it struck me when reading Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that times has changed immeasurably and are only going to continue becoming more and more about mechanics and robotics. This authentic way of living is going to be gone within the next 500 years. That is a scary thought.

Professor Vesna reiterates that robotics is in everything we do related to manufacturing and it is quite an amazing field that is really booming. The more intelligent robots are becoming the more intelligent our society will become and I agree with Rodney Brooks when he states in his TED talk that it would not be a surprise if in the next 500 years that there wont be robots everywhere, doing everything. It is insane to think years ago I owned Furby but I didn’t think of it as a robot. They have been around and are only continuing to grow.

“Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art”(Benjamin, 3). Culture and society formed the imagery of the first robots we saw and continue to have a major impact on the way digital art is perceived. For instance the way we perceive a piece of artwork in person is different then the way we perceive it in a movie. Specifically, in the movie blade runner. This idea of human replicates are presented and shown how they are indistinguishable from humans. These manufactured creatures are able to dangerous work without fear because they have no soul.  

VERSE

After researching more in depth about Karel Capek who invented the first robot it bothered me even more thinking that our society could possibly be taken over by robots in the future. Robots have no souls. This means that our world will have no emotion, no energy, no communication just strictly machines completing tasks with no soul attached. This connects back again to how our society is so influenced by art. Art is in fact behind all the technology driven and manufactured robots that are to come. Humans produce art and robots are a product of the genius minds behind it.

Sources:

Benjamin, Walter. "“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. 1936.

Web.

"Blade Runner (1/10) Movie CLIP - She's a Replicant (1982) HD." YouTube. YouTube.

Web.14 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWPyRSURYFQ>.

"Rodney Brooks." Rodney Brooks. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

<http://www.ted.com/speakers/rodney_brooks>.

"San Francisco Robotics Society of America (SFRSA)." San Francisco Robotics Society

of America (SFRSA). Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <http://www.robots.org/>.