Abstract:The modern history of machines that mimic humans -automata, artist's dummies, mannequins, mechanical dolls, poupées, robots, androids, bionic men and women -is long and varied. Since the birth of the Enlightenment, these adaptable machines have been a testing ground for that perennial question: what does it mean to be human? Eighteenthcentury varieties reflected the rise of materialism and conceptions of the body as machine; nineteenth-century automata provided writers and artists with a way of negotiating con… Show more
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