Organic Artificial Flashback. How Humanoid Robots Remember in Contemporary Movies and Tv Series

Over the past three decades, several audiovisual projects have addressed issues surrounding the cyber body and the relation between prosthetic memory and posthuman self-awareness. On the one hand, many movies and tv series cross the boundary between the body and technology invasion by turning the artificial body into a site hosting organic memory, as the form of implantations or prostheses deals with the paradoxical condition of remembering events that the characters have not lived through. On the other hand, by mirroring the new ways of saving, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memory enhanced by digital media, a crucial concern regards the increasingly impressive capacity of current media devices—from mobile phones, to personal computers, to robots— for gathering and storing information in a range of useful modalities (sound, vision, even touch and smell). The ‘total recall’ issue implies not only a cyclic comparison with the failing memory of the human being, but also a broader reflection on the reshaping of mnestic experiences due to an unprecedented connectivity between brains, bodies, and personal and public lives. By analyzing some case studies, this essay aims to explore the trope of prosthetic flashback, usually associated to humanoid robots, as a contamination between anthropomorphic and technomorphic visual forms.