Hi All!
Thanks again for including me in this exciting discussion. I apologize
for my delay in reply; this discussion week caught me in the beaches,
boulder fields, and bogs of Iceland, where I was participating in an
annual feminist engagement with a small group of long time friends and
collaborators. Needless to say, while this this environment was
stimulating, exciting, and fascinating (we talked a lot about Earth
Sciences), it was not conducive to replying to emails in a timely
manner.
I've often reflected on the humanization that people foist onto robots
and machine aids. I found this resonant with both Jenny's work, Petit
Mal, as well as in Margaret's work, Algorithm Beam. In the latter, I
found myself in the position of the poet. When reading, I see my
child, my program, in the work. I lovingly write the little,
proscribed language that, when read in sequence, can deliver to me a
great delight: a red light, just as I told her to do! A command
fulfilled; I am satisfied. She's so filial, my child. But in the
moment following the moment of triumph, I find myself disappointed as
well: a daughter who only does what I say? That is so lonely, so
narcissistic, so limited-to-myself. I have never wanted a child in my
own image.
In my read, Jenny's study of Big Dog enters the machine-human
interaction into a couple ancient conversations. The first two in my
mind are (1) servant-master relationship and (2) the
human-animal-civilization complex. In regards to (1), if a person owns
a thing, is it a crime to abuse it, physically? If it damages the
thing to kick it, or to drive it until its parts fail, can the person
be held responsible? Current society draws the line as sentience,
speaking to point (2). As an example, if a person drives a Chevy
Silverado until it comes apart, then it not a crime. If a person
drives a horse or mule or dog until it is lame or dies, then yes, it
is a crime. Big Dog uses reasoning so advanced that it could appear to
be sentient. Does that advanced reasoning / mimicked sentience mean
it should not be beaten, kicked, or driven until it falls apart? I
would answer no. But my answer isn't couched in an explicit concern
for Big Dog as equivalent to a real dog.
It is, instead, couched in my concern for the human resultant from the
humanity that has most likely been imposed on Big Dog by its humans. A
human who finds that they have driven their Chevy Silverado to the
point that it comes apart will often express emotional distress
similarly to those expressed at the loss of an animal like a horse,
mule, or dog. A human who abuses a thing like Big Dog may not be
hurting a real dog, but may be hurting himself or others around him
with his cruelty to this non-sentient but emotionally laden object. A
conclusion that then leads me to reflect on the necessity of
considering objects as having discreet and staggeringly important
histories, which which Jenny referred at the latter end of her piece.
Petit Mal was really such an interesting piece of writing. Thank you
so much for sharing this.
In answer to Margaret's question, my interest in robots stems from my
formal and informal study of (1) as an industrial designer, the
humanization of objects on the parts of humans and (2) as a historian,
the economic impact of technological access across societies. As
someone from a rural area, I can trace in my personal history the
points at which access to technology divided me from childhood
friends, shifting the trajectories of our lives away or towards each
other. Formalizing this study during my graduate work in Uganda, I
find that one of the more understudied and interesting aspects of the
current technological paradigm is the uneven distribution of
technology - not just luxury technology - but work-a-day or simple
technology, across populations.
The practice of imaging the near future and its technological
a-symmetry in the form of a short story actually came quite naturally
to me. Short stories have often been vehicles for criticism and
satire, and I explicitly wanted to avoid taking on a technologically
rigorous approach so as to talk about the relationships humans have
with each other, with non-sentient machine objects, sentient beings,
quasi-sentient beings, and artificial, non-machine sentient beings. In
the story, I wanted to produce a binary in which two societies are
tied together in political and economic name but are extremely divided
in practice. How will these societies use technology differently from
one another? What values will be foregrounded by interpretation and
how will those values differ across the societies in question?
In contrast to this comfortable-to-me approach to examining these
topics through short story in my thesis, I found the process of
choosing the excerpts for the Zine quite terrifying. Because I wish to
discuss things that are not quite nice and because short stories are
packed with topics, cutting any one out threatened to deflate or
flatten the story. I'm not entirely sure I made these excerpts
correctly. I'm still conflicted. But I think that the practice of
having to select was good for me in terms of developing as a writer.
Having to make decisions, to make cuts, caused me to see the story in
a new light and to choose to foreground episodes which, in the larger
structure, I could blend together.
A
On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 2:32 PM, J. Rhee <rhee.jennife...@gmail.com>
wrote:
I’m excited to be joining such a great conversation! Thank you for
facilitating this, Margaret! I love Keith’s “Uncanny Emmett
Till” piece and his discussion of the valley as justification for
the inhuman. I totally agree! The uncanny valley and other
“tests” that define the human are often mobilized to de-humanize
certain people. This also resonates with Mark’s thoughts on the
chatbots and intersectionality.
To respond to Margaret’s question, I first became interested in
robots as a when I met the robot Leonardo at a robotics lab at MIT.
Leonardo looks like a cute, cuddly stuffed animal with very
expressive facial features and small, pink human-like hands. It
looks a lot like a gremlin before it gets wet. As I was standing
face-to-face with this robot, I was really arrested by it and all
the complicated ways it was evoking and inscribing the human. I felt
very compelled to explore these inscriptions from within the
humanities. I felt this urgency even more strongly when I began
researching the Department of Defense’s significant role in
funding U.S. robotics research (including Leonardo, as well as
Predator drones). My interest in robotic art comes from my desire to
look for different robotic imaginaries (with their different funding
structures and strategic priorities) that offer different visions of
the human and possible futures outside of militarization (for
example, the pieces in the _Machine Dreams Zine_!). I’m interested
in how the robot inscribes certain visions of humanness and erases
others, particularly in relation to race, gender, class, and
citizenship. Or in other words, I’m interested in how the robot
reflects larger societal practices of dehumanization. Speaking to
Margaret’s question about revising, the further I got into my
research on robots, the more I kept coming back to labor as the site
where robots humanized and dehumanized. Robotic art plays with this
attachment to labor in productive ways that at times reflects these
attachments and at other times challenges them.
all best,
Jenny
Jennifer Rhee
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Media, Art, & Text Ph.D. Program
Virginia Commonwealth University
On May 26, 2017, at 3:31 PM, Margaret J Rhee <mr...@uoregon.edu>
wrote:
Hi All,
These conversation has been so generative, thanks everyone! Buoyed
by all the very exciting work, and appreciate Keith and Sun Yung's
insights, and joining the dialogue! To add to Keith and Sun Yung's
wonderful contributions, I'm pleased to introduce two more
participants from the Zine, Ana Monroe and Jenny Rhee!
Ana Monroe is a designer and writer, and her inventive short
fictional piece, Les Futures Flanuers, drawn from her MFA thesis
at Art Center College of Design is on page 36.
As a scholar, Jenny Rhee's moving piece, "Petit Mal,
Proprioceptive Precocity, and Robotic Futures," on Big Dog, and
other robotic art is excerpted from her forthcoming monograph, and
included in the Machine Dreams Zine, page 45.
Check out their respective work here:
https://issuu.com/repcollective/docs/machine_dreams_issuu [1]
Their bios are below.
To begin, like Sun Yung and Keith's exciting work on cyborg
poetics and worlds, could you both speak on the inspirations
behind your research on robots, and fiction writing? More
specifically, I understand that both of your excerpts drew from a
dissertation and a thesis, and I wondered if you could reflect on
the process of revising into another form that was published in
the Zine, and in your larger body of work?
------
Jenny Rhee
Jennifer Rhee is an assistant professor of English at Virginia
Commonwealth University. Her book, All Too Human: Labor and
Dehumanization in the Robotic Imaginary (forthcoming, University
of Minnesota Press, 2018), examines cultural forms and
technologies to highlight the robot's entanglement with
dehumanization and devalued labor. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in venues including Camera Obscura, Configurations,
Postmodern Culture, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Literature, and Thresholds. She is working on a new book
on counting technologies and practices, from the emergence of
statistics to contemporary digital surveillance. Bringing science
and technology into conversation with artistic and literary works,
this book examines who determines what counts, who constitutes the
uncounted or the uncountable, and who is all too readily counted.
Ana Monroe
One year after earning her Modern History A.B. from Columbia
University in 2004 and following a quick stint as a translator at
the first Apple Store in the world (Soho, New York), Ana began her
design training by jumping into the creative role of Prop Stylist
for Still Photography projects. In this position, Ana was
responsible for the physical elements of the shoot: the props, the
sets, the fabricated, and the found.Moving quickly into Production
Design for both larger scale Stills projects as well as Motion
Picture, Ana led the Art Department section of movie making.
As a Production Designer, Ana worked closely with the Director and
Director of Photography to bring a script off the page. Research
into the visual languages of diverse groups and historical
periods, ethnographic inquiries, and sheer imagination all combine
to form identity of a production. The practical side of both
Styling and Designing required the development project management
skills. She created and managed budgets, schedules, and personnel.
The scope of this role honed not only the ability to conceptualize
and produce myriad design styles, but also that of visualizing and
evaluating options, managing teams, and growing client
relationships.
She applied and was accepted with an Honors scholarship to the
award winning Media Design Practices Department at Art Center
College of Design in 2014. Working in the field with UNICEF as
part of her 2014-2015 year, Ana quickly gained praise for her self
directed technology projects with Luzira Primary School as well as
her evaluations of UNICEF’s MobiStation and ICT projects.
During her 2015-2016 thesis year, she received both Honors and
Thesis Awards and worked with advisors such as BMW DesignWorks
lead Mike Milley and Art Center College of Design's DesignMatters
Chair Mariana Amatullo. She is now a Service Designer leading
multiple projects from The Innovation Lab at OPM, detailed to the
Office of Veterans Experience at the Department of Veterans
Affairs.
--
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon
--
Ana Monroe
www.anamonroe.com [2]
[3] [4]
[5] [6]
Links:
------
[1] https://issuu.com/repcollective/docs/machine_dreams_issuu
[2] http://www.anamonroe.com
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamonroe
[4] https://twitter.com/aanatecture
[5] https://www.pinterest.com/anatecture/
[6] https://instagram.com/anatecture/
