The Pregnant Robot

[surface2air]

And now something cool




Hard nipples, soft lips. Nurturing for the 21st century.

She's no robo-cop. She's no Schwarzenegger. A pregnant robot? The mother might be hardwired for the millennium, but the android baby is taking us back to good old-fashioned human flesh. Like an amniotic crystal ball, perhaps the baby is telling us about our future. Not the future virtual, but the future terminal.

Why can't robots have children?

A little humanoid robo-fetus floating in its mother's external womb, no less loved and certainly no less nurtured by the fact that its mother is an android with milk-sucking vacuum pumps for breasts, silicon for a cervical cortex, fiber optic cables wrapped in icey-blue titanium for fingers, and an indefinite network of telemetry for a nervous system. A perfect scene of maternal bliss between baby android and its mother carrier. This image of the pregnant robot welcomes us to the 3rd millennium, to that point where the human species as we have known it disappears, and even human fertility is downloaded into alien bodies. But, perhaps, not so alien: the robot has human lips (a Cindy Crawford smile?), and just a trace of skin across her face. Is this a haunting presence of the human that is intended to emphasize the absence of flesh, or a trace of the disappeared human body that is meant to enhance the cold beauty of the designed body of the robotic woman? And the fetus? It's carried in the remote-powered hands of the robot outside the womb, but it's definitely human. The robot as a future servo-womb for a human species that has displaced motherhood? Or the android baby as the successor species to all the ruling robots?

But maybe there is no pregnant robot, just a psychological projection in the form of a painterly image of an android mother and baby-in-a-bubble of a double human anxiety: a projective sense of bodily alienation directed to the vanishing of the human species into robo-flesh, and a more retrospective alienation of humans from their own bodies. Or perhaps something else. When the machines finally come alive in the form of flesh-eating technology, we will have achieved not only the end of the human body as we have known it and the end of history, but also the end of pregnancy.

A pregnant robot? Well, if this is our future, it's not so bad. Humans have always been crawling out of their skin on the way to android consciousness, and robots dream every night about giving birth to little humanoids. After all, human skin is the very best android flesh of all.

It's 2:00 a.m. in the morning, and we're thinking about this image of robotic flesh in front of us which might be our door of misperception to Terminal Futures. Recently, we've noticed a lot of cold romance in the air: sudden breakdowns of personalities and bodies and feelings and relationships. This decade has the feel of the 1890s written all over it; not Mahler's melancholia, but a kind of hyper-inversion of that. Sort of a general dementia that's so big and so crazy that it just bursts though the flesh and goes robo-keening. Like this image of a pregnant robot, titled Introspection.

[harvey_mayway]

[surface2air]

Originally Posted by harvey_mayway

don't just stand there dumb, say something. Either say it sucks or it rocks.

[Spork]

In Washington D.C. it is illegal to post a notice in public which calls another person a 'coward' for refusing to accept a challenge to duel.