keynote:
Ken Goldberg
UC Berkeley
Beyond the Uncanny
Valley of the Dolls
"I want to be a robot." - Andy Warhol
In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay, Das Unheimliche, later translated into English as “The Uncanny”. The essay and the concept of the Uncanny are familiar to literary theorists and art historians, who have charted its the literary and theatrical origins of the concept through works by ETA Hoffman, Mary Shelley, Karel Capek, and Isaac Asimov, its rich history in psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and philosophy, from
Jensch to Freud to to Heidegger to Derrida to Cixous to what Martin Jay described as the “master trope” of the 1990’s.
However, the Uncanny remains esoteric and unfamiliar to engineers and the public. They are familiar with the Uncanny Valley, a related but distinct concept that originated in 1970. I'll describe the Uncanny in plain language, trace its origins back to Descartes and medieval automata, and show how relates to our contemporary human fear and fascination with a broad variety of technologies from AI to cosmetics
to robots to Siri to Google Glass to zombies.
In my own art and research, I'm interested in mortality and the boundary between what is alive and what is life-like. I'll present a series of short films and artworks that explores this boundary, including the Telegarden (1995-2004), an online installation that let participants tend a living garden using an industrial robot via the internet.
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/
Potential Reading:
Cultivating the Uncanny: The Telegarden and Other
Oddities. Elizabeth Jochum and Ken Goldberg.
Chapter 8 of Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis. Edited by Damith Herath, Christian Kroos, and Stelarc. Springer Press. Summer 2016:
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/pubs/
____________
Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor UC Berkeley. Ken is a pioneer
in internet-based robotic telepresence and Cloud-Based Robotics /
Automation and has published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers
on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information
filtering; his inventions have been awarded eight US Patents. He is
Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and
Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of the African Robotics Network
(AFRON), Co-Founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM),
Co-Founder and CTO of Hybrid Wisdom Labs, Co-Founder of the Moxie
Institute, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and
Culture Lecture Series which has hosted over 150 presentations by
artists and curators. Ken's artwork hasbeen exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, ICC Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and the Whitney Biennial. For details on research and art, please visit: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu
