Since antiquity, technology has tried to either control or imitate nature. Both these traditions take advantage of the progress of science, but their teleology and their typical design problems remain basically different. The technology of the artificial may be defined as the effort to reproduce natural objects or processes by means of current conventional technology and materials. This book reports on the results of a theoretical study of the logic characterizing any attempt to design something artificial. While designers of artificial devices work in their own area facing field-specific problems (e.g. bioengineering, artificial organs, robotics, AI, ALife, remakings, etc.), the present study refers to the artificial in itself, trying to find out what is common to instances very far from each other, in an intrinsically interdisciplinary way. The result may be defined as a proposal of a general theory of the artificial . Contents: Theory: The Icarus Syndrome; The Concept of Artificial: Fiction and Reality; 'Copies' of Reality; The First Step Toward the Artificial: Observation; Eyes and Mind: Representations; The Exemplar: Background and Foreground; Essentially, What Is a Rose?; Reality Does Not Offer Any Discount; The Difficult Synthesis of the Observation Levels; Emergency and Transfiguration: i.e., 'Something Always Occurs' Classification of the Artificial; A Note About Automatisms; The Reality of the Artificial: The Bionic Man; The Universe Under the Microscope; The Boundary Between Illusion and Compatibility; The Artificial as an Interface; The Difficult Choice Between Structure and Process; Artificial Organs and Senses; The Artificial Brain; Prostheses and Surrogates; Artificial Environments; Virtual Reality. Readership: Researchers in bioengineering, artificial intelligence, the sociology and history of technology, art and medicine, and

philosophy.