MS ROBOT

Week 31: Notes

Maria, Sophia or Ava and others, are robots designed by men to resemble women

In a society that thinks of assistants, caretakers, helpers, maids or sex workers being mainly female occupations, constructing robots as women helps to reinforce these stereotypes in our minds.

Jia Jia was built by a team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei as a ‘super-lifelike robot goddess’ in 2016. As she rolls through the room in her golden dress, long flowing hair and perfect skin she addresses her constructor as master. Katy Perry,

US-American singer and songwriter, envisions herself as a sexy robot, but instead meets a technically induced death.   Brigitte Helm was a German actress (1908 –1996). In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, an expressionist, silent-film epos from 1927, she played the dual role of Maria and Maschinenmensch [mechanical person]. Another young Chinese man built himself a beautiful woman robot resembling Scarlett Johansson, the US-American actress and singer at home. Kristanna Loken, a US-American actress and model, escapes a Beverly Hills shop window as a cyborg assassin in a female body. Sophia was turned on in February, 2016. She is modelled after the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, actress Audrey Hepburn, and her inventor David Hanson’s wife. In 2007, Martine Rothblatt commissioned Hanson and his company to create a robot using her wife, Bina Aspen Rothblatt, as the template. A song by Bjork, the Icelandic singer, songwriter and actress, was made into a music video directed by British video artist Chris Cunningham in 1999. It was called a milestone in computer animation at the time and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and in several other art exhibitions. The story of Diane, an android domestic worker was created by students of ARTFX, a school based in Montpellier, France, and ranked as one the best for Visual Effects and 3D Animation education.

Tan Ce Ding is a Malayan film director. In his film the main actor Loong falls in love with the beautiful android TX-59 and is faced with the grave decision between romance or submitting to his father…