The Simulacrum and the Copy. The Contemporary Imagination of the Artificial Being
Abstract
Starting from the opposition posed by Deleuze between the copy-icon and the simulacrum, the article analyzes some contemporary works which present us with hybrid figures of artificial beings as copies or "continuations" of human beings: the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back and the novels Permutation City by Greg Evan and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The issue under scrutiny is whether the recent instability or lability of the distinction between Copy and Simulacrum in fictional imagination is a sign of an ongoing change in the notion of identity: in other words, whether in the era of total digital mediation it is still possible to distinguish between authentic and simulated, natural and artificial.
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References
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Filmografia e serie TV
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA, 2001.
Black Mirror, Creata Charlie Broker, UK, 2011-; episodi: Be Right Back, stagione 2, ep. 1 (2013), sceneggiatura di Charlie Broker; White Christmas, episodio speciale (2014), sceneggiatura di Charlie Broker (versione presente sulla piattaforma Netflix Italia).
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