Attention cultural historians, museum curators, and robot enthusiasts. On Saturday, the San Jose Museum of Art opened an incredible exhibition on robots that continues through October 19th. This compliments some previous observations I’ve expressed about the robot icon in American culture. Here’s the blurb from their website:
Robots: Evolution of a Cultural [...]
Those who have read my blog for a while know about my ongoing interest in robots, particularly the development of the robot archetype in popular American Culture in the early twentieth century. By and large I’ve sought to understand these depictions of robots within the cultures that produced them. Whether that was the [...]
David Overholt exhibited his project “Robby the Racist Robot” at the 2007 ITP Winter Show. There are a few things that I love about this project:
1) Dave interfaced a dot matrix printer with his macbook – pure genius
2) the analysis Robby conducts is based on actual data that it aggregates
3) the [...]
The past several weeks Paleo-Future has shared great posts about robots, which I’ve looked at in The “savage” robot in 1937 and Decoding Al Capp’s Robot, Continued. The brief timeline of pre-Asimov robot history I created began with Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots – which is featured in the most recent Paleo-Future post, a 1922 [...]
Published prior to Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics” and after Capek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots, Al Capp’s ’savage’ robot comic fits within an interesting place of robot history. A brief time line to illustrate this:
1921 – R.U.R. premiers in Prague and popularizes the term robot
1927 – the silent science fiction film Metropolis by [...]
Paleo-future has posted a Lil’ Abner comic that ran in the July 18, 1937 edition of the Charleston Gazette, featuring a robot that suddenly turns violent. Visit their blog for the complete strip. I’ve featured one part of the comic that stands out the most, where the professor refers to his robot as [...]