Uncanny intimacies

humans and machines in film

pp. 330-338

in: Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck, Curtis D. Carbonell (eds), The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

In its Riley v. California ruling requiring the police to get a search warrant to access mobile phone content, the US Supreme Court argued that: "modern cell phones, (…) are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy" (Riley v. California 2014). This somewhat poignant Mars reference suggests that we have developed a close, even intimate, relationship with the machines and technologies we use. Chris Hables Gray and colleagues argue that we cannot think of the human-machine relation as partnership any longer, but rather as a symbiosis that is controlled by cybernetics and that influences our imagination, imagery and thought processes (Hables-Gray et al. 1995, 4).