BEYOND THE BLACK BOX is a performance-lecture exploring embodiment and intelligence in humans and machines. We ask what roles our bodies—robotic, humanoid, human—play in establishing intimacy and trust in human-robot interactions. How do the features of these bodies, their overall design—whether anthropomorphic familiarity, alien beauty, or some uncanny in-between—shape the relationships possible between humans and machines.

The presentation extends work we have undertaken over the past year—an anthropologist, education scholar, and emerging media artist—experimenting with new human-machine interactions. We have staged our human performer (HUMAN), humanoid robot (PEPPER), and snakelike co-robotic arm (CRANE) in open, embodied exchange. These performances play the embodied traits of each one of the other—their perceptual processes, their modes of expression, and their kinesthetic freedoms—revealing something about the qualities of each. This lightning talk introduces our recent performance-lecture at SLSA, in advance of our IDEAS performance at the Qualcomm Institute in 2024.

Live performance has historically been a site for developing new and studying emerging technologies. It provides a rich environment for investigating future scenarios involving human-robot interaction and exploring the potential of machinic performers. However, robots onstage frequently fall into the “metaphorical human” trap, where robots imitate human behaviors like speech, dialogue, and gestures. Even with recent advancements in generative AI, our thinking about robots has not changed much in the last 300 years. This talk looks at examples from art and performance that look beyond the human to investigate how robot performers might look and behave when designed from a relational, rather than a representational point of view. Investigating robots along the axes of difference helps us to imagine new ways of designing machines and re-configuring our relationships to technology. Thinking beyond the human can lead to an ethical reimagining of how we might relate to machines.

Creating interactive robotic and telerobotic performance productions as an artist evidences the penchant by both passive viewers and active inter-actors to attribute personality, intelligence, and emotion to robotic entities. This is true even with machines lacking any semblance of artificial intelligence and/or operated as puppets. No matter the physical appearance of the performative robot, whether humanoid, abstracted, or virtual, or its location, such as museums, urban streets, theaters, or virtual venues, sentience is often attributed to these inanimate machines. Often the machine is treated as the “other.” There is a social psychology between humans and machines and between humans and humans when they use the machine as a vehicle for human-to-human communication. Is there a common sense of something we are lacking in our lives, that as adults, we so eagerly attribute absent qualities to machines? Is this similar to the phenomenon of “love at first sight?”

A Piece of the Pie Chart  is a robotic installation consisting of a computer workstation and a food robot. It also tweets. The food robot puts pie charts onto real, edible pies. The data on the pie charts addresses the gender gap in technical environments. They depict different gender ratios in art and technology environments, such as art venues, conferences, and tech companies. Visitors of this gallery installation can use the robot to create pies. Pictures of these pies are automatically taken and disseminated via Twitter (now X). The pies can be taken by visitors to eat during coffee breaks at their workplace. The idea is to spark discussion among work colleagues.  Mapping gender data onto images of edible pies is a way of adding a material representation to gender statistics. It is also a way to add more urgency to the feminist cause.

In this talk, Bae Jaehyuck will describe the various artistic endeavors conducted at teamVOID studio, which employs industrial robots. The presentation will focus on the significance of industrial robots as a medium and the messages intended to be conveyed through the works.

Framing singular robotic experiences, I empower the conflict arising in seeing robotic representations as anthropomorphic identification and as anthropocentric separation. While some robotics strive for re-creation, it is a craft that somehow reflects a desire to produce a convincing replica while falsifying it. I am looking at aesthetics of behaviours, where the alterity is introduced through a technology of representation, dramaturgy and mise-en-scene. The experiences give a glimpse of the increasing agility and adaptation needed by humans to co-exist with robots in post-anthropocentric futures.

I am presenting robots that touch you, that makes you dance, that scares you in the dark, that crosses you in a narrow corridor. Experiences that you likely have already encountered in a world without machines. How will they change with these quasi-living creatures? How can art raise questions and awareness about our inevitable future with these persisting and demanding objects?