Strange Places (original) (raw)
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This article explores the ways in which robots' behaviours are designed and curated to elicit reactions from their human counterparts. Through the work of artists such as Nam June Paik, Steve Daniels, Edward Ihnatowicz and Norman White, a survey of robotic art illustrates a particular aesthetic and behavioural language that is non-threatening, animalistic, cute, quaint and whimsical. Considering the artists' programming of behaviours and construction of aesthetics, the use of animal behavioural modelling, and developments in social robotics, this article unpacks how meaning is inscribed onto robots and in return how affect is transmitted to human viewers. By exploring the whimsical bodies, performative machines and networked nonhumans brought forth in robotic artworks, this article draws out how aesthetic and behavioural languages of robotic art play into peoples' emotional and affective encounters with them.
The Aesthetics of Encounter: A Relational-Performative Design Approach to Human-Robot Interaction
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This article lays out the framework for relational-performative aesthetics in human-robot interaction, comprising a theoretical lens and design approach for critical practice-based inquiries into embodied meaning-making in human-robot interaction. I explore the centrality of aesthetics as a practice of embodied meaning-making by drawing on my arts-led, performance-based approach to human-robot encounters, as well as other artistic practices. Understanding social agency and meaning as being enacted through the situated dynamics of the interaction, I bring into focus a process ofbodying-thinging;entangling and transforming subjects and objects in the encounter and rendering elastic boundaries in-between. Rather than serving to make the strange look more familiar, aesthetics here is about rendering the differences between humans and robots more relational. My notion of a relational-performative design approach—designing with bodying-thinging—proposes that we engage with human-robot enc...
OUTPUT: Choreographed and Reconfigured Human and Industrial Robot Bodies Across Artistic Modalities
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Millions of industrial robots are used across manufacturing and research applications worldwide. Handfuls of these robots have been used in dance, installation, and theatrical art works as tools and performers.OUTPUT, a collaborative artwork presented here, employs an industrial robot as choreographic source material and dancing body in order to reframe these robots as performers and bring them into closer proximity with the general public. ThisOUTPUTwork has existed as a performance, installation, and augmented reality application. All three formats of the work include improvisational components, where a human can dance with a representation of themselves alongside an industrial robot, facilitating an embodied and creative experience next to these sequestered machines.
Designing A Robot for Elderly Care Homes based on the Notion of 'Robot as Theatre'. (Pictorial)
Proc. of Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2021). ACM New York, pp 242–251., 2021
Robots are predominantly thought of as monolithic, unitary actors: they are almost always designed as having a clearly defined body. We rethink this concept of a unified and coherently embodied robot with the example context of elderly care. We explore alternative design spaces for robots in care that open up new modes of interaction for residents and caregivers. We present design studies that explore this notion based on the development of a plant-watering robotic ensemble. The ensemble consists of various elements that inform interacting persons about the robot’s task and its role in a storytelling or poetic way. We show how we further explored this idea of a ‘robot as theatre’ in two different configurations – one agentic and one diorama – and a version that integrates feedback from focus groups with care experts.