Robotic Erotic Electric: Literature, Film, and Comics in the Age of AI

March 28, 3:30-5:00 pm, STEW190

*English-ASL Interpretation will be provided for the duration of the event.

In the 21st century, where algorithms shape desire and screens frame our sense of self, Robotic Erotic Electric: Literature, Film, and Comics in the Age of AI investigates how artificial intelligence reshapes the human. This project examines novels, films, and comics that merge flesh and circuitry, revealing the pleasures, anxieties, and transformations of living with our digital doubles. At the intersection of the delirious erotic and the sobering hegemony of AI, the project tracks how electric currents of technology both seduce and discipline, reshaping imagination, cognition, sociality, and desire.

This work is the culmination of a decade-long engagement with robots, AI, and human consciousness. It began with Robotic, Erotic, Electric (San Diego State University, Spring 2014), where students mapped telematic desire across film, literature, and emergent social media, exploring the interplay between affect and code. The Fall 2018 seminar, #roboticeroticelectric Factory, moved the focus to the production and labor of desire—students dissected cinematic robotics (Ex Machina, Her), AI-mediated sociality, and comics’ mechanized bodies, while engaging with theories of labor, objectification, and posthuman corporeality. In Fall 2024, #robotHIVE brought AI into a laboratory-like setting, emphasizing generative technologies, cybernetic networks, and the ethical stakes of human-machine erotic entanglements. Students experimented with coding exercises, narrative reconstruction, and critical writing, producing analyses of AI aesthetics that ranged from networked art to comics’ modular architectures.

In November 2024, this work achieved international reach: at Sapienza Università di Roma, where Dr. Nericcio delivered a mini lecture series, “The Robots are Coming! The AI are Here! … And I Feel Fine! (I Think): #roboticeroticelectric24,” for advanced cultural-studies students, and at IULM Università, Milan, a lecture, “The Power of Images in the New Digital Ecosystem: From American Platforms to the Applications of Generative AI,” for media-studies students. These lectures foregrounded both AI’s seductive potential and its disciplinary power, illustrating how contemporary digital environments transform attention, desire, and identity.

Institutionally, this project grows from SDSU’s digital-humanities lineage. As director of the MALAS program,  Dr. Nericcio co-hosted the first digital-humanities courses at SDSU alongside the English Department, providing a structural foundation for interdisciplinary engagement with AI, literature, and media studies. These courses incubated critical explorations of AI-mediated identity, the erotic and electric entanglements of networked subjects, and the mechanisms by which technology amplifies and disciplines cultural expression.

His publishing trajectory reinforces the transatlantic dimension of this project. He is co-editor, with Antonio Rafele and Frederick Luis Aldama, of Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (Hyperbole Books, SDSU Press, 2021), a collection interrogating AI, social media, and post-COVID cultural production across North America and Europe. Essays address memes, Instagram, gaming, fashion, and the border, tracing the crosscurrents between culture and emergent technologies.

Further extending the international dimension, He serves on the scientific committee of the Italian series CCube (Culture, Communication, Consumption), published by Meltemi Editore, Milan. The board includes leading scholars such as Valerie Steele (FIT, New York), Tiziana Terranova (University L’Orientale, Naples), and others from major Italian universities. The committee evaluates proposals, guides the series’ thematic direction, and situates SDSU scholarship within a transatlantic network of cultural-studies and media theory.

The book-project analyzes works such as Her, Ex Machina, Sleep Dealer, and contemporary comics and digital art, interrogating how AI and robotics influence creativity, desire, and identity. Chapters explore the seductive logic of algorithmic attention, objectification in networked spaces, and the ethics of affect in posthuman media. This is a study not of AI as novelty but as structural force: one that reconfigures literary form, cinematic experience, and comic panels alike. Ultimately, Robotic Erotic Electric connects students and scholars to global conversations about AI, culture, and the posthuman.