Menschmaschinen im Film

Martin Forster
2015 unpublished
Artificial humans and animated puppets are quite a popular theme in literature, rooted in greek, roman and jewish mythodology. It seems that mankind wanted to be creators all along. Early examples often require the fantasy of the creator, as only in their minds the creatures are alive. In the 18th century the theme changed to a rather technical and mechanical approach, an example beeing the animated puppet Olimpia in E.T.A. Hoffmanns short novel Der Sandmann. In contemporary literature the
more » ... of Philip K. Dick come to mind, which often dealt with artificial humans. Sigmund Freud's belief, that our relationship with the "alive but dead" is an ambivalent one, is based on his thesis about the "uncanny". Things that are alive but shouldn't be are an unearthly thing to see for most people. Based on his thesis the phenomenon of the "Uncanny Valley" was noticed, which is that when machines look and act very closely to like a human beeing would, they are uncanny to us. Cybernetics and it's approach of "Feedback-Loops" were the basis for Artificial Intelligence, which is now beeing further developed for use in hard- and software alike. On the other hand technical innovations are changing the native human body too. But the ultimate goal is to fully build (or grow) an artificial human. This could also be interpreted as the overcoming of death and also of the idea of god. Robots, Cyborgs, Androids and Clones are a constant given in the Science-Fiction-Genre for it's suitability to try out new ideas and technology. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner shows us a variety, where the artificial human beeings are so close to beeing "really" human, that they've developed the ability to feel empathy. One could argue that they are becoming human – whereas the "real" humans in the movie tend to lose their humanity by beeing stuck in an unhuman system and an unhuman life. The question that's buried within this problem, is, wether or not humaneness should be seen more as an idea rather than something native.
doi:10.25365/thesis.35739 fatcat:yfihl2m7jfcr5ajpu6zjrltreq