APOLOGISTS OF THE NEW CIVILIZATION

Human destiny is to evolve and expand, and that of course include technology development. We are questioning our human biology and challenging what it means to be human. Robots both fascinate us and make us feel uneasy. The idea of creating a humanoid machine or device has existed man’s imagination ever since Antiquity. For time immemorial, man has fantasized about how to create a spark of being in an artificial body. The manner in which such phantasms were manifested depended on the technological endowment of the period in which he lived. Nowadays, robots represent one of the most complex technical achievements of the humankind. It is the paradigm of how to adjust the world to our own measures, found already established throughout the entire history of art and science, which is swiftly taking over the space of the natural by the development of new technologies. The historical transformation of the body is reaching new peaks in connection with the artificial technological structure. There is a time frame being established, based on the recognition that nothing is ever going to be the same as before, when exactly the robots, as well as artificial bio-organisms are going to be the ones who will reason for us what the essence of life is, or what it means to be human. Robots are interesting from the point of humanist philosophy, as they arise the questions concerning the difference between the living - non-living – created - born. When we are in the interaction with robots, we cannot see their inner mechanisms, so at the first sight we simply believe that they are human. The mimesis of a robot, a device with a series of sensors, controls, and pneumatic drives is becoming a simulacrum of the presence of human emotions.

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Maša Jazbec (Slovenia), after having finished the study of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Education Maribor (Slovenia) continues her study at the post-graduate department of Interface Culture, at the University of Arts and Design Linz (Austria). During her study she completes a residence at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences IAMAS (Japan). Her projects, exhibited as artworks, have always shown her understanding of new media as a research artistic practice, stemming from the tradition of the video and the new artistic thought, linked to the current situation in the contemporary society. She is also active as a curator of artistic-scientific events within the frame of the new media culture festival Speculum Artium in Trbovlje (Slovenia). She is currently a Ph.D candidate at Empowerment Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Japan and a visiting researcher at ATR (Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories).

Visit Maša's website: http://www.masajazbec.si/