CREATIVE RESPONSES GO HERE. 

Please post your creative response, or–if appropriate–a summary of your creative response, by replying to this entry.

The Web Bot:

“#!/usr/bin/perl   # -w
# use diagnostics;
use LWP::RobotUA;
use HTML::Parser;
use URI::URL;
use POSIX;
use DB_File;my $url;
my $arg = (shift @ARGV);
my $domain_name = “http://”.$arg.”/”;
my @get_list = $domain_name;
local (%main,%localise);
local $counter = 0;   # local files
my $maxcount = 100;
my $dirname = $arg;”
 

Written strings of command-based algorithms, WebBots are busily at work within the computer networks we access daily, querying specific web sites, monitoring and reporting their findings, and communicating with other WebBots deemed sufficiently “trustworthy,” in order to gain as much reliable information as possible.  Their actions form a complex web of choreography, protocol, and code, a dance of data that is all the more impressive for its apparent lack of physicality.    

If bodiless, text-based robots, such as those catalogued on the WebCrawler search engine (http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/) today are any indication, the conception of the robot as a simulation of physical functioning has traveled an astonishingly long distance since the time of mechanically-enabled ducks, paddling swans powered by clockwork, clumsy and box-like men of metal, and other such automata of an earlier age.  Rather than existing as the embodied mimesis of any physical system, the WebBots listed on WebCrawler, such as the ArchitextSpider on the Excite Search Engine and the ChirstCrawler on ChristCENTRAL.com, are text-based command lines, designed to track and index information on the World Wide Web. 

You can read more about web bots here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002-12-24-web-bots_x.htm Here is the entire Perl code for this retrieval bot by “deep”:
http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/rt_bot2.htm

Cyborg Site: http://www.lclark.edu/~alec/hciwork/cyborg.htm

Bjork “All Is Full of Love” video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQH4AdOg2MU

“Cyborgs Old and New”
Peter Gilgen, Cornell University: Email: pg33@cornell.edu
“The Decay of Lying, or Resistance is Futile”

If you wish, you can post responses for weeks 5 & 6 here by replying to this post.  Otherwise, you can reply to any other post on the site.

I second Kyle’s nomination of the HAL-9000 for the Robot of the Week. 

Image of Hal, from Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)

What I find most interesting about Hal is his physicality, or lack thereof.  Hal seems to lack a body, save for his sole red eye, which, like a camera’s lens, constantly–and at times anxiously–monitors the ship’s crew.  Yet the status of Hal’s body is problematic in the film.  Is he truly bodiless–or does he have the most amazing body of all–the steel hull of a space craft, complete with all of its systems of functioning and human resources?

If you find the HAL-9000 interesting, you might enjoy a couple of other similarly bent films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) and Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977).  Both films feature distributed artificial intelligences, (the Alpha 60 and Proteus IV, respectively) who, like Hal, lack bodies but whose cognition is distributed across a wide variety of physical systems. 

paperguidelines.doc

“The Sand-Man“

Weatherglass: http://www.brassbinnacle.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=WG1&source=adwords

Spalanzani:
http://www.occultopedia.com/c/cagliostro.htm

Clara’s coloring:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Battoni_Euterpe.jpg

Pocket perspective (spyglass)
http://www.stanleylondon.com/tele28spy1.jpg

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4045285854844480169&q=cellular+division 

Blade Runner

Colonization–Roy quotes the poem by Blake:

“America: A prophecy,” printed in 1793: “Fiery the angels fell / Deep thunder rolled around their shores / Burning with the fires of Orc.” Blake’s original words: “Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d / Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.”

Dehumanization of replicants:
1) Contrast to animals
2) Commodification (e.g. Gender and Sexuality)

Role of free will/agency
Commandment/Programming
Symbol of the eye
Creator vs. Created

Evidence of Android affect/interior emotional life.

Notes: Freud Goal

to use a simple child’s toy to demonstrate the way memory and consciousness function 

Points Memory is a mechanical system of inscription and repression 

Identity a system of conscious and unconscious thought  Consciousness if fragmented and discontinuous Chalkboard—unlimited receptive capacity, but no permanence

Paper—permanent receptor, but not unlimited  “All forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves (R135)” 

Hence our modes of reminding and memorizing are insufficient, since they can neither reserve permanent traces nor hold unlimited storage capacity.   Argues that we have two systems at work for this:  1)     Pcpt-Cs.  System of perception consciousness, which perceives reception but like the chalkboard retains no permanent trace—example of this??2)     Mnemic systems lying behind the perceptual system, including the Unconscious. 

Wunderblock or the “mystic writing pad” as a clear and mechanical/technological analogy or example of how our memories and perceptual apparatuses function. Comprised of three parts: Composed of three discrete layers—a wax slab at the bottom, a “transparent piece of celluloid” for the cover, and a clear, transparent sheet sandwiched between— 

the Wunderblock provides an excellent and at times a beautiful metaphor for human memory and consciousness.  The mechanics of the instrument are simple:  write on the top, watch the writing appear from the pressure of a plastic stylus on the gray surface, then peel back the top sheets and watch the writing disappear.  The symbols written remain as traces in the waxen block, but they are no longer visible on the mystic pad’s cover layer.              Freud makes the toy’s relation to the psychical apparatus clear in the passages that follow.  The cover of the pad functions as the system of perception, the wax slab as unconscious repository, and the erasure of writing and renewal of a clean writing surface that comes from the rustling pages of the mystic pad functions as our pulsating and intermittent consciousness:I do not think it is too farfetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system of Pcpt.-Cs. and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception. (230-231) 

Freud describes the functioning of what he calls the System Perception/Consciousness as an interplay between external stimuli and internal feelers sent out by the unconscious.  It is in this intermittent connection between internal unconscious probing and external sensory experience that, as Freud asserts, consciousness occurs: It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from them. (231) 

QuestionsMemory is a mechanical system of inscription and repression 

Identity a system of conscious and unconscious thought Consciousness if fragmented and discontinuous 

How reliable are memories? How do we supplement our memories—only writing? 

What does the supplement become—external and materialized portion of the mnemic apparatus?  What is significant about this? Subject to tampering, no longer contained within the limits of the human body?  But is it ever confined to the limits of the human body? What is the role of Memory in Blade Runner? 

How do photographs function? How do the replicants go beyond mechanized memory?

“An Old Robot’s Two Times Two”Vladimir Grigorev 

Examples of affect in the story?What is the commandment for these robots?Slippage on page 289 (R25) where the robot is referred to as “The old man”Cyclical creation mythOrangutan—evolution?“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in all your philosophy.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet 

Although not, stricly speaking, a robot–nor even automated–Madame du Coudray’s “Birthing Machine” fits well within early mechanisms which were designed to mimic or shed light upon the body’s physical functioning.  This device, in particular, was quite useful and was used for helping to train midwives in the delivery of children.

For more information about this work, you can consult Nina R. Gelbart’s The King’s Midwife: the History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray.  You might also find the following of interest–Leslie Adrienne Miller’s poem on the subject:

“Madame Du Coudray’s
Woman Machine, 1756″

I perfected an invention that pity made me imagine.
–Madame Le Boursier du Coudray, Abrege

   After D’Agoty’s macabre ecorches
   and Rymsdyck’s tendency to coil
   his innards tight as bags of fists
   and then to paint a fatty sheen
   on every part, I gasp out loud
   when I find Le Boursier’s soft machine
   of linen and leather, the woman’s thighs
   great hams of rosy fabric gathered
   at the knees like parlor bolsters,
   the plush swell of belly draped
   in a modest apron opened in a V,
   that all who would deliver her
   might see the fine embroidery
   of the wrinkled vulva giving way
   to the crowning cloth doll, one puffed
   umbilical cord to announce life,
   another flat to advertise a death.
   While D’Agoty’s sexy ecorches
   live on in countless volumes, only one
   of Madame du Coudray’s machines
   for instruction in the art of birth
   remains, this one with its wicker bones
   and wooden pelvis replaces her original
   which tucked a gate of real pelvic bones
   inside the giant cushion. Sundry detached
   pieces lie about: the pillowy placenta
   as if infused with waters still, the warning
   of a crushed and severed infant skull
   to show the damage of an unforgiving tug.
   She made her mannequin of cloth
   for the women of Clermont who couldn’t read,
   much less afford D’Agoty’s illustrated books,
   who worried more about the warming
   of the wine and butter in which a living child
   was cleansed, or the sturdy shoes the dead
   would need for traveling hard dark roads
   to nurse their babies from the grave.
   She listened while they spoke of prolapse,
   mangled parts, torn limbs and broken backs,
   the ragged, filthy fingernail of someone’s
   helpful aunt or neighbor tearing the sight
   from a child’s eye. From these tales
   she fashioned her machine, pushing
   her needles through the flesh colored cloth
   as capably as she pushed her hands,
   merciful and clean, into the darkened rooms
   of a thousand unupholstered wombs.
–in the June 2005 issue of Prairie Schooner

In response to the character Pris in Blade Runner (“your basic pleasure model”), I’d like to introduce you to the following femme-bot antecedent: the Stella 500, one of several ladies who comprise ”Mudd’s Robot Army” in episode # 41 of Star Trek (original series).  In this episode, a society of androids holds the notorious conman Fenton Mudd hostage for a mysterious purpose and provides him with an army of female robots, including a version of his wife Stella who–unlike his real-life wife–obeys his every whim.