Human-Non-Human: the Speculative Robot

Abstract

In this paper we explore and unpack the implications and issues arising from our exhibition project Technics and Touch: Body-Matter-Machine, which tested the limits of human and robot proficiencies through a series of experimental scenarios. The project explored methods of producing feedback systems through perception and action cycles. The exhibition consisted of two parallel events: a laboratory space where the artists were “in-residence,” producing drawings in conjunction with the robot; and a procedural drawing exhibition in an adjoining space, where the outcomes of this human/nonhuman team were exhibited alongside the work of practitioners who have been exploring rule-based drawing for some time. The aim was to make and to discuss approaches to embodied, expanded and autonomous intelligent systems. Towards that end, we worked to articulate a range of ideas that emerged from the project: the expanded space of the robot, which includes a complex human-non-human set of relationships that imprint upon the newly created network of the human-non-human (a better if more cumbersome word for the expanded space we currently call “robot”) and, the notion that this expanded space of the “robot” introduces a set of response parameters that were not aimed at duplication or fabrication but at exceeding the critical frameworks that filter and reduce what counts as “real.” This makes the robot-system, Ela, a speculative robot, one that is thoroughly embedded in this process of co-creation.