O trágico, o humano e o robótico na série 'Westworld': reflexões sobre a ficção de streaming

Abstract

The series Westworld revolves around a futuristic amusement park where androids identical to humans are programmed to play a narrative role in the clients' experience. In this article, I propose to build on reflections about the constitutive ambiguity of Greek tragedy, as developed by scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Bernard Knox, to think about how conflicts between the human and the robotic are portrayed in the show. Based on this study of the tragic in Westworld and the works of N. Katherine Hayles on posthumanism, this article also aims to reflect on how the phenomenon of streaming series relates to the concerns about artificial intelligence explored in the series. Finally, I aim to condense all these tensions into a reflection on the place of fiction in contemporary culture, in dialogue with the text “Mundialização do ficcional: O si mesmo como espetáculo e a reconfiguração dos rituais” by Aline Magalhães Pinto.