7-week online class
Sundays, June 19, 26, July 3, 10, 17, 24, 31
Time: 12 pm EDT (New York City time)
$145 (Patreon members) / $165 (Regular admission)

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

What does it mean to be alive? Is it possible to create life through artificial means? Humans have been creating objects mimicking living things for over 2,000 years although the word “robot” was only coined in 1920. In this course we will use an older term for these machines: “automaton”- ancient Greek for “self-mover.” As we will see, although the impulse to create artificial life has been with us for eons, the meaning of that activity (and the automaton itself) has changed dramatically over time and across cultures.

Starting with global myths of gods and magicians who made effigies walk and talk, we’ll discover the actual ancient technologies that brought such miracles to life through clever stagecraft and engineering. The cultures of Islam not only preserved late antique Greco-Roman texts detailing these secrets, but improved upon and added their own traditions of animated fountains, automatic musicians and mechanical animals. Chinese, Japanese and classical Indian technological histories will reveal the long lineage of Asian examples. We’ll look at medieval European clocks and cathedral organs that were filled with moving, dancing and singing automata! We’ll discover how Renaissance savants and Baroque engineers incorporated these technologies into stage-craft and war-craft and how the gardens and courts of the aristocracy used automata to entertain and to inspire awe.

During the Scientific Revolution, Rene Descartes adopted a mechanical model of the body. He postulated that animals were nothing but automata. In the 18^th century several inventors such Jacques de Vaucanson and the Jacquet-Droz family attempted to simulate life through mechanism. During the Victorian Age, the traumas of the Industrial Revolution and the repetitive nature of factory work cast the automaton in a more sinister light. E.T.A Hoffmann and other Romantic writers exploited this new unease around the mechanized body in their fiction. We will end the course in the aftermath of the First World War, the coining of the word “Robot” by Karl Capek, and the dawning of the computer and cybernetic age!

In the final week, students will be invited to present a final project of their choosing related to the topic of automata or robots. Projects can be either in written form (essay, poem, short story etc) or be a personal art or technology project. The teacher, being an artist and poet (as well as having an academic background) fully appreciates and enjoys seeing the full range of creativity that students can bring to a subject when it excites them.

The instructor willprovide links to public domain sources, as well as PDF excerpts from other relevant texts before class each week and students are invited to ask questions and engage either during or after the lecture.

Week 1: ROBOT THEORY AND ROBOT ORIGINS

• Introduction to the topic of artificial life and the methods of inquiry

• Theories of human response to robots

• The liminal, the uncanny and the double

• Are we all robots? World creation myths on the origin of life

• Classical myths and classical sources on automata

• Sacred machines of ancient Egypt and Alexandria

• The ancient engineers

• Byzantine shock and awe

• Automata in classical Islamic cultures

• The transmission and augmentation of classical technologies

• Automata and royal diplomacy

Week 2: ROBOTS EAST AND WEST/ ROBOTIC EXOTICISM

• The legendary and actual automata of ancient China

• Japanese automata of the Floating World

• Western vs Eastern viewpoints on the nature of robots

• The automata of Buddhism and classical India

• Techno-orientalism as history and as critical tool

• Robot as other: The exoticism of European automata

• The automata trade between Europe and China

Week 3: MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE AUTOMATA IN EUROPE

• Automata in the high medieval romances

• Mis/understanding automata in medieval science and philosophy

• The “invention” of the mechanical clock and its transformation of culture

• The moving allegorical figures on clocks

• Automata in churches and religious celebrations

• Renaissance engineers and ancient knowledge

• Automata in royal gardens, pageants and feasts

Week 4: CARTESIAN AUTOMATA & ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINES

• Early modern science and machine models

• Descartes and the beast-machine

• Hobbes & La Mettrie: the automaton state and automaton human

• Great automaton makers: Vaucanson, Jacquet-Droz, Cox

• Automata and spectacle: from royal court performance to public exhibitions

• “Aprés-moi les automates”: robot analogies of monarchists and revolutionaries

Week 5: THE ROMANTIC AUTOMATON & ITS INDUSTRIAL COUSINS

• The Chess-playing Turk and automaton trickery

• The automaton in Gothic and Romantic literature: Poe, Hoffmann and others

• Frankenstein, galvanism and historical wetware

• The Future Eve and new Pandoras

• The concept of the Unheimlich/uncanny

• The luxury trade in Parisian automata

• Automata on the stage: Robert-Houdin and the new techno-magicians

• Thermodynamic bodies and the industrialization of labor

• Artificial intelligence: Babbage and Lovelace and their predecessors

Week 6: THE ROBOT REVOLUTION IN THE CYBERNETIC CENTURY

• Capek’s “R.U.R”

• Lang and Von Harbou’s “Metropolis”

• The robot as Utopian and Dystopian archetype in the 20^th century

• Mis/reading robots in the history of technology

• Grey turtles, mechanical mice and the cybernetic zoo

• Robot consciousness: more than we (can) know

• The mythology of the Singularity

• HOMO DEVS
  
  Week 7: FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION
  
  Jason Lahman is an American visual artist, sculptor, poet and cultural historian. He studied illustration at Parsons School of Design and art history at the New School in New York City. He holds an MA in modern European history with an emphasis in the history of science and technology from San Francisco State University where he taught in the humanities department. He completed his PhD coursework in the history of science at the University of California at Davis and has lectured widely on the topic of technology and visual culture, with a special emphasis on early cinema and automata. He is currently based in Portugal where he maintains a full-time studio art practice.