Robotic Performance: An Ecology of Response

Abstract

Read online

This article looks into regions of human-robotic and inter-robotic relations in performance. Artwork presenting inter-machine and human-machine entanglements in robotic performance requires attention: it addresses recent concerns with the crisis of ‘the obsolete body’, yet also calls for acritique of what constitutes a response. The present article works toward a concept of response that simultaneously reinstates the status of automata as counterparts to ‘humans’ and invites biological bodies to reassess their place in a world. Herein notions of interaction, empathetic immersion, and machine personhood intertwine to shape a new ecology of bodies. Robotic performance thus drafts out an immersive ontology of bodiesto raise questions that are mostly ecological. It allows us to look into practices that put on display the border between an organism and an environment, prompting us to think toward the dissolution of that border into a network of co-determinative systems.

Keywords

• robotic performance, ontology, ecosophy, the nonhuman, body, response