Expo : et l’Homme… créa le robot

Le mardi 5 février, avec un collègue, nous avons accompagné un groupe d’étudiants de deuxième et troisième année de licence informatique à une exposition temporaire du musée des arts métiers.

Outre le fait que nous avions commis l’erreur d’accepter un rendez-vous une heure avant l’ouverture devant le musée, dans le froid, l’exposition était décevante.

L’accent était un peu trop mis sur des robots anthropomorphes et le hall d’exposition, en cul de sac, se terminait sur la thématique des robots au cinéma. Cette impasse finale dans le domaine du simulacre me rappelait terriblement, une nouvelle fois, cette histoire de voitures volantes.

[…] I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they ? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”

That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new ; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless ; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche
David Graeber