Maiden Machines: On Human Creatures and Artificial Creators

Palomilla is a machine capable of responding to light impulses and reacting to its environment, invented by the father of cybernetics Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Rachel is the unsuspecting replicant in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner. Sophia is the most advanced robot being tested since 2015 by Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong.

These are just some of the maiden machines featured in this extraordinary “hybrid book about hybrids” set in an indeterminate future, in which machines, once settled as a new natural species, raise the few surviving humans in gardens for research purposes, while searching for their own origins, lost in the past. The creatures of men have become their creators. The feedback loop between human and artificial becomes a way to rewrite human history, the history of technology and a new philosophy.

Brunella Antomarini teaches contemporary philosophy and aesthetics at John Cabot University, Rome. Her books include Thinking Through Error: The Moving Target of Knowledge (2007/2012), The Acoustic Pre-history of Poetry (2024), L'errore del maestro. Una lettura laica dei Vangeli (2006) and La percezione della forma in Hans Urs von Balthasar (2004). She is the co-author of Aesthetics in Present Future: The Arts in the Horizon of the New Technologies (2013) and Haephestus Reloaded. Composed for 10 Hands (2019).