Sublime dreams of living machines : the automaton in the European imagination / Minsoo Kang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kang, Minsoo.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Robotics--Popular works.

Robotics.

Robotics--Europe--History.

Robots in art--History.

Robots in art.

Popular culture--Europe--History.

Popular culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (387 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Kang’s central contention is that the automaton, a machine that can move by itself (better known today as the robot), is one of the essential ideas with which people in the West have pondered the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang’s telling, automata are mirrors of the ideas, fears, and anxieties of a given era, in that attitudes towards the machines have always been indicative of a moment’s zeitgeist. The book is historically sweeping, but not comprehensive; the focus is on what Kang takes to be key changes in the representations of and responses to automata. His main interest is on how Europeans in different periods of the past thought about the very notion of a self-moving machine that acted as if it were alive and how they used it for various symbolic and intellectual purposes.

Contents:

The power of the automaton

The talking head and the list of wonders

The man-machine in the world-machine, 1637-1748

From the man-machine to the automaton-man, 1748-1793

The uncanny automaton, 1789-1833

The living machines of the industrial age, 1833-1914

The revolt of the robots, 1914-1935.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674264908

0674264908

9780674059412

0674059417

OCLC:

709594561