Robotic Performance: An Ecology of Response

Abstract

This article looks into regions of inter-robotic and human-robotic relations in performance. It defines robotic performance as a staged robotic interaction witnessed by a human audience or taking place irrespective of human presence. Works presenting such robotic creatures and their worlds address recent concerns with the crisis of 'the obsolete body' (as diagnosed by Stelarc).1 Yet they also attest to a certain level of participation that involves not so much 'human' entities than the intricate intra-cosmos of robotic artifacts. Rather than resorting to negativity ('the body should be overcome'), robotic performance simultaneously reinstates the status of automata as counterparts to 'humans' and invites biological bodies to reassess their place in a world wherein entities formerly known as 'human' become part of an incessant exercise in inter-translational and co-determinative practices.For this purpose, attention is paid to performances whereby mobile automata are involved in a variety of doings seemingly irrespective of human intervention. Such performances invite us to think of new, not restrictively human, models of participation. According to the present article, robotic performance drafts out an immersive ontology of interlacing bodies. This immersive ontology becomes a starting point for a revision of knowledge production patterns related to notions of participation as a human communal activity, as something inextricably related to concepts such as 'life' and 'the living'. Rather than thinking in terms of 'participation' or 'interaction', here we can begin to think in terms of a practice that could be best described as 'response'.The ontological portrait of robotic performance can be said to revolve around recent interest in the generative force of matter itself and the clearing of a space of radical relationality within this genesis that allows levels of being to realign and open to one another. In the performances we 163 PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (1) (2017) witness an encounter between degrees of matter across the organic-artifactual divide, cutting across notions such as consciousness and intentionality to appeal to the very ontological processes that organise the given. Here nonorganic matter is perceived as an active participant in an ongoing ontogenesis, capable of altering its surroundings and bringing forth change in a world. In this way, artifactual entities open to one another and to a world of relations as they co-create a space of togetherness. This, however, is not achieved by putting on display an appealing and harmoniously constructed artifactual world. Rather, we are exposed to artifactual beings that mimetically render some most unsettling human features.The present article dedicates a short excursus to each of these points. It aims to demarcate a field of vision and a set of lenses through which robotic performance can be encountered. These pages continually switch back and forth from the 'reality' of performance to the reality of what we have been accustomed to call 'life'. By do...

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