The vitality of androids. Living and non-living in the of modern science fiction TV shows

Abstract

Humanity has been inventing a robot throughout its history. The steam-powered Pigeon of Archytas and the automatic servant made by Philo of Byzantium belong to the antiquity. Automatons of St. Albertus Magnus, Bacon and Regiomontanus, the Jewish golems, the anthropomorphic idols of Daedalus, the “Iron man” of the Russian monarch Ivan IV, Leonardo’s mechanical knight, the Writer, the Draftsman and the Pianist of Pierre Jaquet-Droz. Each following epoch filled up the list of inventions seeking to come as close as possible to the likeness of the living. At the same time, the desire to reproduce any possible manifestations of vitality has always been accompanied by unaccountable fear of the artificial, non-living and its invasion into the living space. With the advent of cinema, these desires and fears have acquired a new “face” – the number of all sorts of doppelgangers, technical entities generated by the science has multiplied; new images – robots, cyborgs, androids. They have got not only a new aesthetic, a special screen appeal of animated machines, but also a new subjectivity – a certain type of perception based on the indistinguishability between artificial and natural. The modern media landscape offers opportunities for conceptualization beyond the oppositions: the extension of the idea of life, the existence of hybrids and human network extensions, variations of artificial intelligence, autonomous non-human agents and communities. In this regard, the new authenticity seems to be an inseparable combination of technical and natural existing in the same space, in the same body. The article explores the idea of new subjectivity of androids, cyborgs, replicants in modern science fiction TV shows, connected with a special vitality, perception, senses and cognition (“Extant” (2014-2015), “Humans” (2015–2018), “Westworld” (2016–2018), “Altered Carbon” (2018), “Raised by Wolves” (2021)