Â鶹Éçmadou

This paper explores the uneasy boundary between the apparent agency of synthetic humanoids (the personification of things) and the increasing reliance of human beings on mechanical prosthetics, apps, and AI (the thingification of persons).  It looks at representations of human/machine entanglements in cinema, from Metropolis and Blade Runner to Ex Machina and Under the Skin, and in novels by Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me) and Katsuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun). Looking to the future, it contrasts Donna Haraway's radically ironic thinking in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985) against the deadening literal-mindedness of a Singularity transhumanist like Ray Kurzweil.

James Donald is Emeritus Professor of Film at Â鶹Éçmadou Australia and Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool (UK). He is author of Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture (2015), Imagining the Modern City (1999), and Sentimental Education (1992), and editor of thirteen volumes, including Fantasy and the Cinema (1989), Close Up: Cinema and Modernism (2000) and The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (2008). He was editor of Screen Education in the late 1970s and founding editor of New Formations. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

This talk is co-hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub and by the Â鶹Éçmadou English and Creative Writing Programme in the School of the Arts and Media.