Welcome to this term’s first K3 seminar. It will be held by Bojana Romic, researcher and Marie Skłodowska Curie ‘Seal of Excellence’ Fellow at K3.

The title of the seminar is Artificial Creativity. The robot as a techno-cultural icon, and it is based on her ongoing Marie Sklodowska Curie research project.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, September 9 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/62851677275.

Below is an abstract for the talk:

From Terminator to Roomba: the robot occupies a special place in our cultural repository.  On the one hand, it represents cutting-edge scientific research; on the other hand, the robot is a figure of fiction and science fiction (Kakoudaki, 2007). The nascent field of cultural robotics aims to critically address this tension, and show how it reflects on the strategies of communicating science (Latour, 1996; 2000).

During my talk I will make an effort to explain why we are facing some terminological obstacles when researching AI and robots (also referred to as embodied AI), taking into account the history of this technology and cultural context. These matters become even more complicated when we discuss the status of the artefacts produced by AI and robots. The structuralist approach I am using in my research aims to avoid “othering” of this technology, which results in a dualistic “man vs. machine” discourse – prevalent in the Western popular culture.