Artificial Culture

Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve. Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

"Rev up that Zamboni. Even the most hardened of hockey fans and critics will find something new in Artificial Ice." - Stephen Hardy, University of New Hampshire

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the discourse of genomics as well as through the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and 'wetware', Sarah Kember extends current understanding by demonstrating the ways in which this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information systems. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of life-as-it-could-be.

Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data, or algorithmic culture, are simultaneously reshaping everyday culture while perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. Contributors situate issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity, offering a critique of the myriad constraints enacted by algorithms. This book argues that consumers are undergoing an ontological overhaul due to the enhanced manipulability and increasingly mandatory nature of algorithms in the market, while also positing that algorithms may help navigate through chaos that is intrinsically present in the market democracy. Ultimately, Algorithmic Culture calls attention to the present-day cultural landscape as a whole as it has been reconfigured and re-presented by algorithms.

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants – not robots – but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization.

This book brings together contributions to the Fourth Artificial Life Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the summer of 1994.