Robotic Performance: An Ecology of Response
Keywords:
robotic performance, ontology, ecosophy, the nonhuman, body, responseAbstract
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.References
Aristotle. De Anima. 1993. Translated by David W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon.
Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3: 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206
Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623
Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity.
Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Translated by Graeme Kirkpatrick and Aliza Krefetz. London: Bloomsbury.
Dery, Mark. 1994. “Simulator Sickness and Spectacular Destruction: Survival Research Laboratories’ Theater of Operations.” Oz 16: 58–61.
Guattari, Felix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Guattari, Felix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. 1989. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. 1999. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Paffrath, James D. 1984. Ed. Obsolete Body / Suspensions / Stelarc. Davis, CA: JP Publications.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2011. “‘…The Sound of a Breaking String’ - Critical Environmental Law and Ontological Vulnerability.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2011.01.01
Scott, David. 2014. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert. 2009. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7: 4–16.
Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226793733.001.0001
Yussof, Kathryn. 2013. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Knots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2): 208–26. https://doi.org/10.1068/d17411
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
