Android Portraits

Claire Jervert describes her Android Portrait project, which examines the historical traditions of portraiture in relation to recent developments in robotic science; international nature of android robot projects, and efforts to achieve extreme human verisimilitude; historical portraiture’s goal of conveying the uniqueness and psychological depth of the individual human being; applying these traditional elements of human portraiture to the depiction of contemporary androids, as a metaphor for the questions of human uniqueness raised by the development of humanoid robots; and the future of portrait traditions in relation to increased integration of androids into everyday life.