Artificial Lives: The Humanoid Robot in Contemporary Culture

The theme of the humanoid robot has been entwined with media, literary\r\nand audiovisual imagery ever since the origins of the culture industry. In its\r\nvarious versions, it has shaped visions and more often fears fuelled by\r\nmodernity and technological progress. The humanoid robot is both a reality\r\nthat today is taking on material and concrete forms and an imaginary\r\nand fantastic construct that embodies meanings and sensibilities established\r\nin decades if not centuries of fictional representations.\r\nThis volume seeks to offer different perspectives of analysis on the cultural\r\ndiscourses related to robots, as they emerge in contemporary representations\r\nin film, television, and videogames; to detechnologise this object of\r\nstudy, considering it in its dimension as a cultural construct, between fiction\r\nand reality, and rethinking the definition of the fundamental features of the\r\nidea of the human and the margins of its configurability.