“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, September 28, 2012

SLSA Liveblog 5: Nonhuman Scales of Sense (Jennifer Rhee)

“The Anti-Robot Proprioception of Simon Penny’s Petit Mal,” SLSA (”Nonhuman”), Milwaukee, September 27–29, 2012
distressing video about Big Dog being used in military applications (Boston Dynamics)
slavish subservience to humans, robot is kicked
Suchman: a different configuration would require much greater imagination and a radical change in our collective sense of what’s worth a headline
trying to find robotic imaginaries in different political environments
Simon Penny’s Petit Mal, an autonomous robot work
Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (Sara Ahmed)
objects need to have stories of their relations and histories of arrival
early robots such as Shaky didn’t fare well in real world situations
they inhabited worlds that were representational
Petit Mal moves haltingly and at times invades humans’ space
Petit Mal seeks to charm and surprise
Big Dog makes you afraid
Ahmed: contact >> opening of future between objects

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