[English-undergrad] FYI: M100.01: A Conversation with Allison de Fren

[James Tobias]

Hello everyone,

Because of ongoing events, I have re-worked the third hour of my graduate seminar tomorrow Friday 1/30 as an “alternative” seminar conversation. 

There is some space available for guests, and Zoom is possible, so if you are interested, let me know.

Here’s the description of the event.

Take care,

jt

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M100.01 Presents "ENGL 246 RE-WORKED": A Seminar Conversation with Dr. Allison de Fren
 
1/30/26 5:00 PM
 
Fun with Bots, Borgs, and Patchwork Humans: Why can’t NEO write?
 
In light of the ongoing and often violent industrialization of the senses, memory, and now most intensively, cognition, this conversation between Dr. Tobias and Dr. de Fren will guide a critical (and likely at times humorous) discussion with seminar participants of ENGL 246 on the contemporary image and implementation of artificial humans, with the recently released household robot “NEO” as our starting point. For possible contexts, we might think about the infamous robot-witch of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) whose wicked, seductive spell threatens to destroy the homes and factories of the city of the future; we might think back on the long observed demand, going back at least to Soviet montage, for denizens of advancing economies to craft a suitably contemporary form of writing adequate to industrial expression; we may remember legends of labor, mighty men or women at war, or in rhythm, with encroaching industrial machines; we might recall the long history of preindustrial and industrial automata including Pierre Jaquet-Droz’ automaton The Scribe (1774), or of Tim Hawkinson’s Signature (1993) and Woody Vasulka’s Scribe (1998) automata from the 1990s. For methods, we will work with cyberfeminist concerns with writing and computation articulated in Web 1.0-era hypertexts like Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl or early digital cinema narratives like Lynn Hershman-Neeson's Teknolust (2002); we will keep in mind histories of racialization and of surveillance, problems of capture and flight. We will have scholarly concerns with, among many other things, augmentation or extraction in mind.  But we will begin our conversation with a screening of Allison de Fren’s video essay “Fembot in a Red Dress” - all in order to place NEO the humanoid domestic appliance in a larger line of fictive, physical instruments having multiple identities: as laboring machines, art or design objects, philosophical toys, diviners of the unknown, and of course, as in “Fembots,” imagined instruments of seduction and pleasure. Placing NEO in this line, and observing the arguably both childlike and feminized aspects of NEO as domestic laborer, we will ask: why must little robot NEO work?! Why can’t NEO write?! And, if NEO is writing (because of course he is, unbeknownst to us!), how are we to read their (our?!) work?! 
 
This informal conversation is open to guests by invitation; your senses of criticality, curiosity, wonder, humor and indignation are required for admission.
 
This conversation is the kick-off event for a series of events organized as M100.XX by Dr. de Fren and Dr. Tobias and taking place throughout 2026, commemorating and détourning the one hundredth anniversary of the production of the silent cinema classic Metropolis (Lang, b/w, Germany, 1926). If you are interested in joining, in person or via Zoom, please email jtobias at ucr.edu <mailto:jtobias at ucr.edu> .
 
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—
James Tobias, Ph.D.
Professor 
Chair, Department of English

https://ucr.zoom.us/j/95465985946?pwd=Z1A4Yk1UZDhBTjY5UkJ5R1VQTWUvQT09

"We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water, and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all of their ancestors and descendants, past, present, and future. Today this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands."

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