Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Robot: A Visual Atlas from Ancient Greece to Artificial Intelligence
Author: BEATRICE LUCA
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 02/10/2017
Imprint: 24 ORE CULTURA
Price: $65.00
Publishing status: Active
From Ancient Greece onwards, humans have been swept up in a race to replicate and rebuild
themselves. We design automatons that mimic human functions or improve on them, born from
a desire to take evolution into our own hands, or even play God. In fact, every form of cultural
expression has at some point investigated the rich and stimulating field of robotics, reaching
different conclusions and outcomes every time.
Robots have infiltrated our social consciousness. They are everywhere, from Leonardo da Vinci’s
drummer robot to the futurist man-machine; from Frankenstein to the works of Isaac Asimov
and Philip Dick, inventor of the ‘replicant’; from Edward Gordon Craig’s theory of the actor as a
super-puppet to Daft Punk and Kraftwerk, the krautrock band who used replica mannequins of
themselves at the end of their concert. It doesn’t end there, either. Robots feature heavily in
cinema (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and George Lucas’s Star Wars saga,
to name a few). They star in innumerable comic strips and cartoons (from Astro Boy to Marvel
comics and Japanese manga). Fields like design, architecture and fashion, where creativity
encounters industry, turned the robot into a commodity rather than a character. ‘Robot’ became
a style in itself: kitsch and chic, fun and futuristic. Nowadays, when laptops, tablets and
smartphones, the robots of the contemporary age, are in every house, car and pocket, the
tin-and-steel robots of yesteryear have acquired an irresistibly vintage flavour, which makes
them all the more desirable.
Robot: A Visual Atlas from Ancient Greece to Artificial Intelligence appreciates this rich variety.
Through tracking the conceptual development of the robot through western cultural history, it
uncovers the roots of our fascination with artificial humanity.
ISBN: 9788866483717