Colloquium: Emotional Machines: Toward an Affective History of Technology and Intimacy in Japan

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2017/2018 colloquium

Elena Giannoulis and Daniel White, Freie Universität Berlin

Emotional Machines: Toward an Affective History of Technology and Intimacy in Japan

Recently emerging technologies in Japan of companion robots, virtual home assistants, and the emotional artificial intelligence driving their software show the potential to transform traditional social relationships as well as to create new hybrid emotional spaces of human-computer interaction. Moreover, the advance of technologies capable of sensing physiological changes in bodies outside conscious awareness suggest implications for the science of emotions, as new sources of affective data become increasingly available. This presentation explores the cultural implications of recent technological transformations of intimacy in Japan and asks what it might mean to construct affect rather than emotion as a historical object.

Elena Giannoulis is Junior Professor of Japanese Literature in the Institute for Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council research group Emotional Machines: The Technological Transformation of Intimacy in Japan (2017-2022). Her first book, published in 2010, deals with the notion of authenticity in contemporary Japanese literary self-narratives. Currently she focuses on spatial studies, genre and literary theory, the literary market in Japan, and self-narratives from the perspective of the affective sciences.

Daniel White is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Senior Researcher within the European Research Council research group Emotional Machines: The Technological Transformation of Intimacy in Japan. Trained in cultural anthropology (PhD, Rice University), he analyzes cross cultural approaches to affect and emotion in cultural policy, public institutions, and in the rapidly advancing fields of affective computing and artificial emotional intelligence in Japan.