| Shrnutí: | The fictions of the Uruguayan-Argentinian writer Horacio Quiroga allow a case study on how media shape the image of artificial life. While “El hombre artificial”, one of his early novellas, follows a nineteenth-century scheme of electromagnetic transmission of consciousness, later texts chose “N-rays” (“El vampiro”) or cinematographic projection (“El espectro”) as a ground for spectral life. This is not, however, the only difference between the early and the later fiction. The models of literary invention follow, on the one hand, the history of technology and the author’s own passion for science and cinema; on the other hand, they can be related to forms of publication, such as the serialized novellas of the illustrated magazine, and the form illustrations and commercial advertisements pervade literary creation. The way artificial life is handled throughout Quiroga’s work sheds light on his own constitution as an author: behind the making of the artificial being stands the making of the artist.
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