This event is from the archives of The Notice Board. The event has already taken place and the information contained in this post may no longer be relevant or accurate.
In the new real, we are running with the robots. Industrial robots for seamlessly automated car manufacturing; medical robots for facilitating patient care in assisted living retirement communities; warrior robots engaged in materializing the imaginative game scenarios of cyber-warfare; toy robots that promise a happy first encounter between machines and the newest generation of humans; and, most of all, invisible robots circulating in the data clouds of social media as SocialBots. Perhaps more than we may suspect, ours is already a blended reality in which robots not only live among us as artificially programmed prosthetics equipped with articulated limbs and complex sensory arrays, but have also begun to live within us, quietly but insistently bending the trajectory of human perception, imagination, and desires in the direction of a future life of the mind that bears unmistakable signs of a robotic imaginary.
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are writers and lecturers in the area of the technology, art and the digital future. Arthur is the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture and CRC in Technology, Culture and Theory at the University of Victoria. Most recently, he is the author of Exits to the Posthuman Future (Polity) and Body Drift (University of Minnesota Press). Marilouise and Arthur have co-authored Surveillance Never Sleeps and co-edited the anthology, Critical Digital Studies. Together they edit the peer-reviewed electronic journal, CTheory.
Image credit: After the Drones, Video Image, Jackson 2bears.
Contact:
Jarrett Duncan | jarrett.duncan@uleth.ca