Beating Nature: Artificiality, Imitation and Simulation

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5

Mankind has always been dreaming of being godlike by creating humans and super humans not through the sexual act of reproduction with women giving birth but through the mental and technical skills of (male) artists, mechanics and scientists. While many have succeeded in actually creating machines resembling humans (automatons, wax figures, puppets, marionettes, androids), it were first and foremost the visions and alternative realities of writers and filmmakers which have sparked the cultural imagination. Their fantastical creatures such as living statues, homunculi, golems and mandrakes instil such conflicting feelings as fascination and fear, desire and horror.

This module will relate the cultural history of automatons, androids, machines with an overview of the motif of the artificial human in various European cultures, starting with Ovid and Hesiod up to films such as Metropolis. The module aims to make you aware of the various issues which have been explored through the motif of the artificial human, such as the question of what it is that makes us human, notions of the self, identity and gender, theories on the nature-culture-divide, the body-soul-dichotomy, concepts of creativity and ideas of the real and the hyper-real.