Haunted Machines and the Fear of Mechanic Life

The 2019 Udine/Gorizia International Film Studies Conference will investigate the interrelationships between automation, representation and “viewing/listening dispositives” from early to late modernity/postmodernity. In doing this, we would draw on the “1900 episteme” (which is the main feature of the “technical society that come into being in the 17th century and became the flourishing industrial society of 19th century”) and the tripartition spectator (or user)-machine-representation” (Albera and Tortajada, 2010). More precisely, we aim to stress the function of automatism in long-term dynamics of dispossession, integration, training, disorientation, deprivation, proletarization, and rejection of the human being/“subject” as a creator/producer and as a consumer/viewer/listener: how do these dispositives imitate human faculties? And how do they imitate the world that surrounds us? How do they imitate life? Not by chance, with the rise of an emerging “machine agency” and a new “subject of history” (Anders, 1980) between the 17th and 21th Century, “technologies took over”: automated cultural activities and daily routines “were increasingly imagined as living entities” (Parikka, 2010). For being capable of recording movement over time, the cinema and the media double the world that surrounds human beings.

1999

In popular imagination, ghosts, or the spirits of the departed have always existed as traces of the past. But today, like anything else in this world, if they want to survive they need to adjust to the present, if not future. Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary Asian horror cinema, perhaps to a certain extent also because unlike in the rationally repressive west, many Asian cultures do not rush to deny spiritualism, but rather negotiate the ways in which spiritual experiences can apply to media and technology-infused global societies. This article focuses on examining the ways new media and visual technologies affect the representation of ghosts in contemporary Asian horror film, in effect producing a new variety of spirits, named here “ghosts in the machines.” These new spirits materialise within photographic and video images, transmit themselves through television frequency waves, become embedded in an electronic code, scramble the signal of video surveillance cameras, clone themselves using cellular technologies, replicate through text messages and emails, hack computer systems and infect the cyberspace better than any computer viruses known to man. Since the described phenomenon can be seen as a feature characteristic of contemporary Japanese horror cinema, this article will focus mostly on Japanese horror films and those Korean, Hong Kong and Thai films that seem to follow the Japanese model or exist in intertextual relations to it.

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media

The main purpose of this paper is to overview the differences between various embodied experiences we, as users, can have when interacting with contemporary visual media. By using the concept of modes of imagination, the author is approaching the problem of media specificity from another perspective. Using the four different "Ghost in the Shell" narratives as a coherent case study, the paper discusses the different modalities in which the most important categories of contemporary visual forms of representation (cinema, animated cartoons, graphic novels and video games) create immersive practice. The assumption is that "cinematic mode" or the "gaming mode" have their own ghost-like "modality", as they bringing the user/ reader/ viewer inside their imaginative world differently. The discussion about modes and modalities is not rejecting the semiotic modes theories, it rather proposes a change of view. Starting with the philosophical intuition of Jacques Derrida, who claimed that what we imagine is never the image that we see, by the fusion of the two fundamental dimensions of any illusion, this author takes into consideration the deep separation between image and imagination. Using the insightful method of "hauntology", the author overviews the most important theories about media specificity and proposes the use of cinematic modalities as experienced by the users of film as fictional world.

aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento / Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 2024

Introduction to the Special Section "The Natural World in Cinema", vol. 11, n.º 2 da aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento / Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. With Maile Colbert and Susana Mouzinho

"Świat i Słowo", 2016

In recent films emotions/affects are recognized as crucial for creating, recognizing, understanding, and communicating with artificial intelligence (AI) agents. AI is increasingly portrayed as capable of manipulating human affect and as itself subject to affect. The paper discusses romantic relationships between AI agents and humans in "Blade Runner" (1982), "Ex Machina" (2015) and "Uncanny" (2015), situating their portrayal in the context of post-humanism and affect studies. It also discusses the Turing test as a form of testimony. When the earlier gothic imagination focused on humans falling in love with mechanical dolls, as in E.T.A. Hoffman’s "Erzählungen" and G.B. Shaw’s "Pygmalion", the delusion that these artificial creatures were love-worthy was in the eye of the beholder. The contemporary post-humanist imagination posits the reverse possibility that AI agents may fall in love with people and with other AIs, or at least pretend to love in a convincing manner. By the same token, humans are stripped of their uniqueness and imagined as reducible to a machine-like status. The recent films extend this similarity of humans and machines by focusing on romantic scenarios involving both. The mechanistic grasp of affects is both implied and thematized in "Ex Machina" and "Uncanny", where a sense of the peculiarly human persists in romantically inflected versions of the Turing test. The notion that machines can be convincing at the game of love shows that affects are increasingly understood as crucial to our understanding of AI. Conversely, this notion also suggests that distinguishing between the peculiarly human and that which machines are capable of imitating is more problematic than ever.

2016

but it provides a distant echo of Heidegger‘s notion of “enframing” (Gestell) and his observation that the essence of technology is not anything technological (Heidegger, 2007, p. 5). For Heidegger, this means, first of all, that the essence of technology has nothing to do with meansends relations or with technology as a tool or an instrument. References in the following to “nontechnical” or even “technophobic” images of technology invoke magical notions of technology. According to these magical notions, technology is not primarily an ingenious way of extracting as much as possible from the limited resources of a limited world. Instead, nontechnical dreams of technology envision that the world could turn out to be limitless, after all, and that technology can alter even our conceptions of what is technically possible. While Ernst Cassirer draws a strict dividing line between this magical image of technology and the realities of engineering in the context of nature and society (1930,...

Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2017

This article compares two examples of industrial patronage in the late 1950s. The first is the 1958 filming of Le Chant du styrène by filmmaker Alain Resnais, with a voiceover of a poem by Raymond Queneau, with funding from the Péchiney firm. The second is the 1959 exhibition Forces et rythmes de l'industrie ("Forces and Rhythmes of Industry") by painter Reynold Arnould, organized with funding from 12 major French companies. We show how similar these two operations were, from two perspectives: first, the logic behind arts patronage for major firms of the time, and second, the esthetic and social issues at stake for the representation of industry in the context of the debate on automation. An historic and esthetic analysis of Resnais' film and Arnould's canvases provides an opportunity to discuss the societal concerns of this period of accelerated industrial development in Europe in the 1950s. We then look at the perspective of these artists in light of the work of sociologists from this period, who were conducting fieldwork in the same factories that Resnais filmed and Arnould painted.