Matt Whistler gets his head around his phobias

Right, there’ve been some word challenges directed at me on Facebook and I need to get this out of my system.

Firstly I would just like to take this opportunity to say I feel I may have been overloading the East Sussex public at large with my previous missives about my obsession with robots. Whilst I make no apologies for my art, I will make this the last column about robots for a sustained period of approximately two weeks (joke).

So, here we go: the word Autonomaphobia came to me through some quick fire Google searching. My understanding through Wikipedia was that it meant Fear of Robots. I have since found out three weeks into my art exhibition campaign, that this is a misspelling and that the word I should be thinking of is AUTOMATONOPHOBIA, which means fear of anything that falsely represents a sentient being, e.g ventriloquists and dummies, wax statues or animatronic creatures.

The thing is, I originally wanted to think of a word that truly represented The Fear of Human Robots as the two are assimilating very quickly. I wanted my viewing public to explore thinking about robots as humans. So, to cut a long story very short, my silly, mistaken, clumsy word mispelling is actually now officially AUTONOMAPHOBIA – A fear of human robots.

And if you are still trying to work out what I am talking about, so am I; perhaps we could meet and work it out between us. Oh no, I think my geek levels have just gone up a notch.