Pygmalion Reloaded: How Robots, Art, and Digital Love Are Rewriting Human Destiny
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Pygmalion Reloaded tracks a long arc from myth to machine, showing how humanity’s urge to animate matter—once staged as marble, automata, and alchemical homunculi—now unfolds through humanoid robots and algorithmic companions. Moving from ancient dolls and Heron’s theatrical mechanisms to Renaissance showpieces like Vaucanson’s automata, then to Romantic anxieties (Frankenstein, the Golem), the essay frames today’s AI era as symbolic continuity rather than rupture. Contemporary figures such as Sophia (art‑making, cryptographic signatures, NFT authorship) and Aria (premium, intimacy‑oriented android) are treated as cultural artifacts that test boundaries of authorship, consent, intimacy, and gender grammar when love itself is reimagined as a programmable protocol. Rather than techno‑utopian or alarmist, the piece adopts a critical‑cultural lens: it asks who controls whom when algorithms mediate desire, and how notions of creation, presence, and responsibility must evolve as art and affection migrate from the hand to code.
Author: Mociulschi, Adrian Leonard
Institution: National University of Music Bucharest
Language: English
Topic: Art, Technology, and Culture
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7125643783
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