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Art and robotics: sixty years of situated machines

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Abstract

This paper pursues the intertwined tracks of robotics and art since the mid 20th century, taking a loose chronological approach that considers both the devices themselves and their discursive contexts. Relevant research has occurred in a variety of cultural locations, often outside of or prior to formalized robotics contexts. Research was even conducted under the aegis of art or cultural practices where robotics has been pursued for other than instrumental purposes. In hindsight, some of that work seems remarkably prescient of contemporary trends. The context of cultural robotics is a highly charged interdisciplinary test environment in which the theory and pragmatics of technical research confronts the phenomenological realities of physical and social being in the world, and the performative and processual practices of the arts. In this context, issues of embodiment, material instantiation, structural coupling, and machine sensing have provoked the reconsideration of notions of (machine) intelligence and cognitivist paradigms. The paradoxical condition of robotics vis-à-vis artificial intelligence is reflected upon. This paper discusses the possibility of a new embodied ontology of robotics that draws upon both cybernetics and post-cognitive approaches.

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Notes

  1. In Lettvin et al. (1959), a key but almost forgotten early work in neuroethology and the biology of cognition, they offer clear evidence of the fallaciousness of cognitivism long before it became dogma!.

  2. While records of transistor research go back as far as 1921 (Lilienfeld), Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley are credited with the invention of the bipolar transistor in 1947, but production (by Texas Instruments) did not occur until the 1960s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor.

  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra.

  4. http://www.strandbeest.com.

  5. I can build an analog device of a dozen components that can do a job, which would take hundreds of lines of code, without the power consumption and the complex ecology of compilers, device drivers, and operating systems. This condition already challenges assumption that the cleverness of a robot can be calculated in lines of code.

  6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kRuxutzluE.

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  1. Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Simon Penny

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  1. Simon Penny
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Correspondence to Simon Penny.

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Penny, S. Art and robotics: sixty years of situated machines. AI & Soc 28, 147–156 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0404-4

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