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Jana Horáková studied theatre studies at Charles University in Prague and Masaryk University in Brno (MA, Ph.D). She is an associate professor in aesthetics (Comenius University in Bratislava, 2011) and guarantee of the Theory of Interactive Media studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She is interested in artistic activities at the point of intersection between art-science-technology with special attention to the media-performance relationship and robotic art. She regularly publishes in Czech and foreign periodicals, books and conference proceedings.

With Jozef Kelemen she won the best paper award at EMCSR 2004 (Vienna, Austria) in the History of science section. She has organized international symposiums Media-Performance (2005, 2007, 2011). Together with Barbara Büscher (Leipzig, Germany) she is co-editor of the Czech-German book Imaginary Spaces (2008). She published her first monograph Robot jako Robot (Robot as Robot) in 2010. Recently she has become interested in media archeology and software studies, and new methodologies of new media studies in general.

Abstract: Fakes, Forgeries, and Robots
The goal of the paper is to point out the blind spot in the spectrum of Karel Capek's Robots interpretations. So far, Robots have become a natural part of our culture. We meet them on movie screens, on pages of sci-fi magazines and books, in toyshops and household appliances shops, in the factories; we can see them in rescue operations and space expeditions in reports on TV, etc. However, the original Robots, the drama characters of the Karel Capek's play R. U. R., Rossum's Universal Robots (1920/21), has been escaping serious analyses from aesthetics point of view. Therefore, I would like to go back to the roots of the Robot's meaning, to introduce the Robot as a special kind of artistic medium. The Robot in the perspective of semiology of theatre, and semiology of fakes and forgeries, will be analysed. The argument leads towards assertion that the Robot, as a sign in work within theatre sign system, establishes a new category in the taxonomy of artificial creatures and serves as a means of questioning the borderline between notions of a man and his double.

Link:
http://www.muni.cz/phil/people/14870/publications

[image source: Jana Horáková]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]