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NEW BOOK BY JULIE WOSK!
Artificial Women: Sex Robots, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females (Indiana University Press, April 2024). AI-enhanced simulated females are becoming ever more lifelike as the virtual vies with the real. They are already having a dramatic impact on social relationships, on our views of women, and our ideas about what it means to be human. The book features examples from robotics, films, television, novels and plays, and art.
The book highlights how new AI technologies are creating ever more lifelike artificial females, and the controversies swirling around these simulations which give the illusion they are real human beings. These simulated females are having a dramatic impact on social relationships, our perceptions of women, and our ideas about what makes us human. The book highlights examples from robotics, films and television, plays and novels, and art. Its chapters include discussions of sex dolls and robots, companions artificial doubles, caregivers for the elderly and infirm, and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.
In Artificial Women, Julie Wosk dives into the intricate ways today's AI-enhanced simulated females--both real and fictional--illuminate our changing views of female identity. In films, television, art, fiction, and today's robotics, these simulated women often reflect old stereotypes, but also highlight a new breed of female robots, cyborgs, and dolls like Barbie in the film that have agency, self-awareness, and autonomy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS: ARTIFICIAL WOMEN
CHAPTER ONE A New Breed of Sex Robots and Sex Dolls
CHAPTER TWO: UNDER THE SKIN: The Fabricated Femme Fatale
CHAPTER THREE: FEMALE ROBOT CAREGIVERS, DOUBLES, AND COMPANIONS
CHAPTER FOUR: PARADOXES OF PERFECTION: A Servant No More
CHAPTER FIVE: VIRTUAL VOICES: TALKING BARBIE DOLLS, ALEX, BITCHIN' BETTY, AND MORE
CODA Includes additional fiction about female robots, art, films, apps.
SOME TELEVISION INTERVIEWS WITH JULIE WOSK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izati_qgR-4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc0nILqo7Ug
OTHER BOOKS BY JULIE WOSK
--- My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (Rutgers University Press).
---Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Johns Hopkins University Press). See www.womenandthemachine.com
---Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Rurgers University Press); New Printing: Breaking Frame: Technology, Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century (Authors Guild reprint edition with new introduction).
---Playboy, Mad Men and Me--And Other Stories.
Julie Wosk, Bag Lady 2, Digital Print, Copyright 2023
JULIE WOSK'S BOOK MY FAIR LADIES: FEMALE ROBOTS, ANDROIDS, AND OTHER ARTIFICIAL EVES (Rutgers University Press)
Runner-up for the 2015 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize
The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet as technology has advanced over the past century, the figure of the lifelike manmade woman has become nearly ubiquitous, popping up in everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science to The Stepford Wives. Now Julie Wosk takes us on a fascinating tour through this bevy of artificial women, revealing the array of cultural fantasies and fears they embody.
My Fair Ladies considers how female automatons have been represented as objects of desire in fiction and how "living dolls" have been manufactured as real-world fetish objects. But it also examines the many works in which the "perfect" woman turns out to be artificial—a robot or doll—and thus becomes a source of uncanny horror. Finally, Wosk introduces us to a variety of female artists, writers, and filmmakers—from Cindy Sherman to Shelley Jackson to Zoe Kazan—who have cleverly crafted their own images of simulated women.
Anything but dry, My Fair Ladies draws upon Wosk's own experiences as a young female Playboy copywriter and as a child of the "feminine mystique" era to show how images of the artificial woman have loomed large over real women's lives. Lavishly illustrated with film stills, artwork, and vintage advertisements, this book offers a fresh look at familiar myths about gender, technology, and artistic creation.
Julie Wosk's Publications
BOOKS
ARTIFICIAL WOMEN: SEX ROBOTS, ROBOT CAREGIVERS, AND MORE FACSIMILE FEMALES (April 2024, Indiana University Press).
MY FAIR LADIES: FEMALE ROBOTS, ANDROIDS, AND OTHER ARTIFICIAL EVES (2015, Rutgers University Press)
WOMEN AND THE MACHINE: REPRESENTATIONS FROM THE SPINNING WHEEL TO THE ELECTRONIC AGE (Johns Hopkins University Press). Artists and photographers, advertisers and writers reveal the impact of new technologies on women's lives.
BREAKING FRAME: TECHNOLOGY AND THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (Rutgers University Press, 1992); new Authors Guild edition BREAKING FRAME: TECHNOLOGY, ART, AND DESIGN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 2013. Nineteenth-century artists and designers capture the dramatic and often traumatic impact of new machines and technologies on American and European society.
ALLURING ANDROIDS, ROBOT WOMEN, AND ELECTRONIC EVES (Images of Artificial Women in Film, Photography, Art, Anime, Video games and more, Fort Schuyler Press). Written to accompany her 2008 exhibit at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, New York City.
SELECTED JOURNAL AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES:
Chapter Six, "Pixturing Women in the Space Age" in After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, eds. J. Bret Bennington and Rodney F. Hill, Univ. of Florida Press, 2023.
"Picturing Female Robots and Androids." Ms. Magazine Blog, August 30, 2017.
"Exhibit Raises Provocative Questions About Female Robots." Huffington Post, August 29, 2017.
"Marjorie Prime"—A Film Where Technology Lets Loved Ones Live Forever." Huffington Post, August 22, updated August 23 2016.
"Ghost in the Shell: This Cyborg Gets Closure." Huffington Post, April 3, 2017.
"Turner's Dazzling Port Paintings in New Exhibit at the Frick." Huffington Post, February 23, updated February 24, 2017.
"Cyborgs at the Whitney Museum." Huffington Post, February 2, 2017.
"The New Curvy Barbie Dolls: What They Tell Us About Being Overweight." Huffington Post February 12, 2016, updated February 11, 2017.
"The Off-Broadway Play "Marjorie Prime" and Today's Technologies: Talking Robots That May Someday Keep Us Company (and Make Us Immortal Too). Huffington Post, January 18, 2016, updated January 17, 2017.
"Update on the Film Metropolis." Technology and Culture 51: 4 (October 2010): 1061-1062.
"On the Cover: Metropolis." Technology and Culture 51: 2 (April 2010): 403-408.
"Catastrophe Chic: A Commentary." Design Issues 23:4 (Autumn 2007): 93-97.
"Designing For Safety: Safe: Design Takes on Risk" (exhibit review essay, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Technology and Culture 47:4 (October, 2006): 791-798.
"Perspectives on the Escalator in Photography and Art." Catalogue essay for the exhibition "Up Down and Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. " Washington, D.C.: National Building Museum/Merrell Pub. Co., 2003: 140-171.
"The Escalator in Art." BLUEPRINTS. National Building Museum (Fall 2003): 12-14.
"Photographing Devastation: Three Photography Exhibits of 11 September 2001." Technology and Culture, 43: 4 (October 2002): 771-76.
"Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design." Design Issues (Spring 1996): 63-39.
"Brunel Meets Brunelleschi" (ornamented machines in America). American Heritage of Invention and Technology (Summer 1995): 58-63.
"Manhole Covers and the Myths of America." Design Book Review (MIT Press), (Winter\Spring 1995): 54-56.
"The Electric Eve: Galvanizing Women in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Literature, Film, and Art." Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (1993): 43-56.
"The P.U.L.S.E. Exhibit." Leonardo(June 1988): 318-20.
"The Impact of Technology on the Human Image in Art." Leonardo (9, No. 2, 1986): 145-52.
"The Impact of Technology on Art and Art on Technology: A College Course Design," in The State University of New York, The New Liberal Arts--Curriculum in Transition (Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1986): 67-71.
"The Distancing Effect of Technology in Twentieth Century Poetry
and Painting." San Jose Studies (Spring, 1985): 22-41. Awarded "Best Article
of the Year" by San Jose Studies editors.
"The Aeroplane in Art." Art and Artists (London) (December 1984):24-28.
"The Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage: A Unique Exhibition Space." Technology and Culture, (April 1984): 292-93.
"The Explosive Emergence of Technology in Art." Art and Artists (London) (December 1982): 11-15.
"Picasso, Car Classics, and the Engineers." Art Education (journal of the National Art Education Association) (July 1982): 16-19.
"Humanities and the Machine: Responses to Technology." Technology and Culture ( July 1982): 435-38. (Report on the State University of New York Conversations in the Disciplines Conference held at SUNY Maritime College, 1981.)
"Lawrence Durrell: The Poet As Pygmalion." Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Quarterly (1981): 158-75.
"The New American Classicism" (technology and American design).
USA Today Magazine, September 1980): 26-28.
"Artists on Technology." Technology Review (MIT Press) (January 1980): 66-75.
NEWSPAPER STORY:
"Waiting For Dr. King" published as "Hearing A Call to Action in a Hymn." New York Newsday, Editorial/Opinion Page (January 16, 2007) [story about Julie Wosk's summer experience as a young civil rights worker teaching English to African-American students for Dr. Martin Luther King's SCLC organization in Alabama].