Over the next week I’ll be posting my thoughts on the different events in Ambiguously Human, starting the with films and then the installation. Here’s the first one, on Wall-E.
Wall-E initially interested me in the context of this project because its heroes are robots that are robotic only in very particular aspects of their lives, and the humans are often robotic. There’s a reversal of roles.
The humans in Wall-E are shown to be mindless consumers. They receive all their nutrition from drink brought to them by robot attendants, they change the color of their clothes immediately when informed a new one is in style, and they exist almost entirely in the digital world. They don’t care about Earth and don’t really seem to know much about it. Children are educated by robots and the content is essentially a commercial. They may be biological humans, but their bodies are atrophied and they don’t use their minds for anything highly individual. They act like robots.