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Inferno

Inferno (2017)

"Inferno is a participative robotic performance. From Dante’s Circles of Hell to theme parks such as Haw Par Villa's Ten Courts of Hell, passing by Joe “the Mechanical Boy”, bodies are handed to eternal and external forces controlling and afflicting them. The archetypical depictions of hell suggest an infinite and mundane control loop under which the body will be forced to move endlessly.

The specificity of this performance resides in the situation where the machines involved in the performance are retrofitted on the body of raptured audience members cum performers. A select group of the public therefore become an active part of the performance, giving a radical instance of immersive and participative experiences. Shifting the exoskeleton’s command from the authors, to the computer, to the audience and to the performers, Inferno questions the nature of control – either machinic or human, either coerced or voluntary – where either utopian or dystopian futures radiate, both real and fictional. Performing the human-made machines of Inferno is a paradox beyond liberation and subjugation."

Source: Louis-Philippe Demers. (2017, October 3). Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/lpdemers

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The Sentient Thespian

The Sentient Thespian (2019)

"The Sentient Thespian tells the story of a sentient robot for the fourth industrial revolution, longing to create sentient companions. Inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, THE SENTIENT THESPIAN portrays Puck, a highly articulate, non-humanoid”, sentient” robot, capable of expressing and comprehending human emotions through gestures. Puck attempts to create a transformative experience for a human and an industrial robotic arm, only to realize that the simulated emotion they appear to express does not in the least resemble the parallel complex emotion of sentient beings like himself. Disappointed that it has failed to make a significant change in his two fellow thespians, Puck walks off, anxious and lonely. Except for a brief break in the fourth wall, the film is styled reminiscent of original silent, black and white films, where man and machine battle the pros and cons of the leap from an agricultural to a mechanical age, and now, to the fourth industrial revolution. The sentient thespian interpolates that struggle to the current dawn of a new post-industrial age where gesture and motion have become a unique type of language replacing speech where the spoken word has become a vehicle only for lies."

Source: The Sentient Thespian – Adrianne Wortzel. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://www.adriannewortzel.com/projects/the-sentient-thespian/

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DANCES WITH ROBOTS

DANCES WITH ROBOTS (2023) by Hortense Gerardo, Amy Eguchi, and Robert Twomey.

"This work-in-progress exploration of human/robot interaction was co-devised by colleagues Amy Eguchi at UCSD and Robert Twomey at U of Nebraska, Lincoln and is part of On Display Global by Heidi Latsky, commemorating the International Day of Persons With Disabilities.

This piece was performed and live-streamed globally on December 2, 2023 and marked the first creative applied research performance work by the Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) Program of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the new INKwell in the Frieder Seible Collaboratory of Franklin Antonio Hall at University of California, San Diego."

Source: DANCES WITH ROBOTS - Hortense Gerardo. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://hortensegerardo.com/DANCES-WITH-ROBOTS

ABSTRACT Robots are becoming increasingly visible in our lives as AI technology is going through unprecedented transformations. This is an important moment to pose questions of how the design features of these robots —both their physical and interaction design — shape their modes of relating, and correspondingly structure how we (humans) might relate to them. This paper describes work studying human-robot interactions through collaborative human-robot artistic performance. It introduces an initial project, Dances with Robots, and current work Beyond the Black Box — which function both as artistic performance and an intervention method to observe/study the changes in human perceptions/feelings towards robots. Through this work, the authors have witnessed how human performers’ feelings and attitudes towards their robot collaborators have changed through time spent in rehearsal and in cooperative performance. Inspired by these observations, this paper introduces the research idea of studying human-robot interaction through robot-human performance artwork.

Source: Eguchi, A., Gerardo, H., & Twomey, R. (2024). Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances. Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 437–441. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640577

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Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2004) by Garnet Hertz

""Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot" is an experimental robotic system that translates the bodily movements of a living, organic insect into the physical locomotion of a three-wheeled robot. Distance sensors at the front of the robot also provide navigation feedback to the cockroach, striving to create a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as the CPU. This project is motivated by three key concepts: 1. Biomimetics, 2. The Cyborg, and 3. The Computational/Biological."

Source: Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot—Garnet Hertz. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2024, from http://www.conceptlab.com/roachbot/

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Them Fuckin’ Robots

Them Fuckin’ Robots (1988) Laura Kikauka and Norman White

"White and fellow artist Laura Kikauka each built an electro-mechanical sex machine (hers, female; his, male) without consulting each other on the particulars, apart from the dimensions of the engaging organs. They then brought these two machines together for a public performance. The male machine, “the first and last anthropomorphic robot I’ve ever built”, according to White, responds to the magnetic fields generated by the female organ, thereby increasing its rate of breathing and moving its limbs, simultaneously charging a capacitor to strobing “orgasm.” The female machine, on the other hand, is a diverse assemblage including a boiling kettle, a squirting oil pump, a twitching sewing machine treadle, and huge solenoid on a fur-covered board — all hanging from an old bedspring and energized by an electronic power sequencer."

Source: Norman White—Works. (2020, September 25). DAM MUSEUM. https://dam.org/museum/artists_ui/artists/white-norman/works-norman-white/

"Donna Haraway’s essay ‘The Actors Are Cyborg’1 explores notions of the cyborg as a performative ‘monster’ and ‘boundary creature,’ and Canadian artists Norman White and Laura Kikauka’s performance Them Fuckin’ Robots (1988) features two robots that violently and comedically copulate. Themes concerning the monstrous, the transgressive, the violent, the sexual, and the humorous have each been applied to cyborgs and mechanical anthropomorphic igures. To these I would like to add the term ‘metallic camp,’ which relects a particular ideology and aesthetic at play within metal performances".

Source: Chapter 29. Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About. Arthur Kroker, & Marilouise Kroker. (2013). Critical Digital Studies : A Reader, Second Edition: Vol. Second edition. University of Toronto Press.

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Petit Mal

"The formulation "an autonomous robotic artwork" marks out a territory quite novel with respect to traditional artistic endevours as we have no canon of autonomous interactive esthetics. Petit Mal is an attempt to explore the esthetics of machine behavior and interactive behavior in a real world setting. Its public function is to present visitors with the embodiment of a machine "intelligence" which is substantially itself, not an automaton or simulation of some biological system. More generally, Petit Mal seeks to raise as issues the social and cultural implications of "Artificial Life". The reflexive nature of interactivity is a focal issue: interactive behavior is defined by the cultural experience of the human visitor. As in the Turing Test, evaluation of interactivity is subjective."

Source: SimonPenny.net. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://simonpenny.net/works/petitmal.html

"Penny sought to design an interaction “in the space of the body, in which kinesthetic intelligences, rather than ‘literary-imagistic’ intelligences play a major part.” [17] Perhaps the only robot yet modeled on a form of epilepsy, Petit Mal loses motor control regularly thanks to its double-pendular body. To create a double pendulum robot that could be used safely in public was no small feat, and the odd amalgam of bicycle parts, ultrasonic and pyrosensitive sensors, and shelf-liner paper was, in Penny’s words, “an engineer’s nightmare.” He sought a robot “which is truly autonomous; which is nimble and has ‘charm’; that senses and explores architectural space and that pursues and reacts to people; that gives the impression of intelligence and has behavior which is neither anthropomorphic nor zoomorphic, but which is unique to its physical and electronic nature.” Penny described Petit Mal as “an anti-robot,” designed to avoid what he saw as the software-hardware (Cartesian mind-body) split typical in research robotics. “Hardware and software were considered as a seamless continuity, its behavior arises from the dynamics of its ‘body’.” Penny’s rejection of Cartesianism was explicitly in reference to feminist critiques of the split, and directed at negating the extreme anti-body (and to be honest: body-hating) perspectives of AI founders like Marvin Minsky or Hans Moravec."

Source: Csíkszentmihályi, C. (2022). An Engineer’s Nightmare: 102 Years of Critical Robotics (arXiv:2205.04831). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.04831

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Concert for Anarchy

Concert for Anarchy by Rebecca Horn

"This upside-down grand piano occasionally comes to life in a noisy outburst. The instrument was used as a prop in Horn’s feature film Buster’s Bedroom 1990, set in a psychiatric clinic. Horn has described how, ‘having freed itself from the psychiatric clinic, [the piano] is now composing its own music’. The piano acts like a living thing: it gets upset and slowly regains its composure. This might mirror our own experience of being startled by the sculpture. Horn’s machines often appear to act like living creatures. She has compared their behaviours to those of human beings: ‘They react as we react. My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality and they must change. They get nervous and must stop sometimes. If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired. The tragic or melancholic aspect of machines is very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and faint.’"

Tate. (n.d.). ‘Concert for Anarchy‘, Rebecca Horn, 1990. Tate. Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/horn-concert-for-anarchy-t07517

Minute 11:10

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Robot K-456 by Nam Jun Paik

"First exhibited ’in the Second Annual New York Avant-Grade Festival’ in 1964, Robot K-456 is Paik’s first work that took a shape of robot. Produced in collaboration with Japanese engineers, this work was a 20-channel remote control robot, and it was named after Mozart’s Piano concerto no. 18 in B-flat, whose Kochel Catalog number is 456. It could walk around the street, play a recording of President John F. Kennedy’s speech, and drop peas as if to excrete. Robot K-456 participated in a number of performances with Paik. In 1982, this robot was set in motion again in an accident-performance as part of Paik’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it was struck by a car while crossing a road. Paik called the performance as “the first catastrophe of the 21st century” trying to reveal the falsehood of mechanical rationality and propose a humanized machine that possesses human anxiety and emotion and experiences life and death."

Source: Robot K-456 | NJP ARTCENTER. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2024, from https://prenjpac-en.ggcf.kr/archives/artwork/n009_robot-k-456

"Cobbled from new and found materials, the robot was far from mechanically perfect: Paik’s own brother, an engineer, asked if he could help to make the robot better. Paik’s nephew recalled that “Nam said no, he liked it like that. He didn’t want a more perfect robot.” [12] Leaflets promoting his robot opera [1964] described the robot walking in Washington Square, Harlem, and “every streets and squares in New York.” [5] Thousands saw and interacted with the robot through the late sixties, on the block and in art venues. After a decade in mothballs, the robot was revived in 1982 at the Whitney Museum where “Paik choreographed a performance titled First Accident of the Twenty-First Century, in which the robot was the victim of a car accident” on 75th and Madison Avenue: an inverted foreshadowing of contemporary Tesla manslaughter. [12]"

Source: Csíkszentmihályi, C. (2022). An Engineer’s Nightmare: 102 Years of Critical Robotics (arXiv:2205.04831). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.04831