Artificial Lives: The Humanoid Robot in Contemporary Culture

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