Think about this scene of the 2014 film, Ex Machina: A young nerd, Caleb, is in a dark room with a poorly dressed femmebot, Kyoko. Nathan, a brilliant robotist, stumbles drunk and abruptly tells Caleb to dance with the Kyoko-bot. To start things off, Nathan presses a wall-mounted board and the room lights suddenly change to a nefarious black, while Oliver Cheatham’s classic “Get Down Saturday Night” nightclub begins to play. Kyoko — who seems to have done it before — begins to dance without words, and Nathan joins his robotic creation in an intricate pelvic choreography. The scene suggests that Nathan impregnated his creation with nightclub functionality robots, but how did he choreograph the dance to Kyoko and why?
Ex Machina he may not answer these questions, but the scene makes a gesture toward an emerging area of robotics research: choreography. Definitely, choreography is making decisions about how bodies move through space and time. In the dancer sense, choreography is to articulate patterns of movement for a given context, generally optimizing expressiveness rather than utility. Knowing the choreographies of the world is about taking into account how people move and interact in complex, technology-laden environments. Choreo-robotists (i.e., robotists who work choreographically) believe that incorporating dancer gestures into machinist behaviors will make robots look less like industrial artifices and instead be more lively, more empathetic, and more attentive. This interdisciplinary intervention could make robots easier to work with, not least given their proliferation in consumer, medical, and military contexts.
Although concern for the movement of bodies is fundamental in both dance and robotics, historically disciplines have rarely overlapped. On the one hand, it has been known that the tradition of Western dance maintains a generally anti-intellectual tradition that poses great challenges to those interested in interdisciplinary research. George Balanchine, the acclaimed founder of the New York City Ballet, famously said to his dancers, “Don’t think, darling, yes.” As a result of this type of culture, the stereotype of dancers as servile bodies better seen than heard unfortunately was calcified long ago. Meanwhile, the field of computer science — and robotics by extension — demonstrates comparable, albeit different, bodily problems. As sociologists Simone Browne, Ruha Benjamin, and others have shown, there is a long history of emerging technologies that project human bodies as mere objects of surveillance and speculation. The result has been the perpetuation of racist and pseudoscientific practices such as phrenology, mood reading software, and AI that seek to know if you are gay by the look on your face. The body is a problem for computer scientists; and the overwhelming response from the field has been technical “solutions” that seek to read bodies without meaningful comments from their owners. That is, to insist that bodies be seen, but not heard.
Despite the historical gap, it may not be too great to consider robotists as choreographers of a specialized type and to think that the integration of choreography and robotics could benefit both fields. Normally, the movement of robots is not studied by meaning and intentionality in the same way as by dancers, but robotists and choreographers are concerned with the same fundamental concerns: articulation, extension, strength, form, effort, effort, and power. “Robotists and choreographers aim to do the same thing: understand and convey subtle movement decisions within a given context,” writes Amy Laviers, a certified motion analyst and founder of the Robotics, Automation and Dance Laboratory (RAD) in a recent National Paper funded by the Science Foundation. When robotists work choreographically to determine the behaviors of robots, they make decisions about how human and inhuman bodies expressly move in the intimate context of others. This is different from the utilitarian parameters that tend to govern most robotic research, where optimization reigns (does the robot do its job?), And what the movement of a device means or makes someone feel has none apparent consequence.
Madeline Gannon, founder of the research studio AtonAton, leads the field in her exploration of the expressiveness of robots. Its installation commissioned by its World Economic Forum, hands, exemplifies the possibilities of choreo-robotics both in its brilliant choreographic consideration and in its feats of innovative mechanical engineering. The piece consists of 10 robot arms that are displayed behind a transparent panel, each clear and bright. The arms are reminiscent of the production design of techno-dystopian films such as Ghost in the shell. These robot arms are designed to perform repetitive work and are commonly deployed for utilitarian issues such as painting car chassis. But when hands activates, its robot arms do not incorporate any of the expected and repetitive rhythms of the assembly line, but appear alive, each moving individually to interact animatedly with its environment. Depth sensors installed at the base of the robots ’platform track the movement of human observers through space, measuring distances and responding to them iteratively. This tracking data is distributed throughout the robotic system, functioning as a shared vision for all robots. When passers-by move close enough to a robot arm, it will “look” closer by tilting its “head” in the direction of the stimuli, and then approach to get hooked. These simple and subtle gestures have been used by puppeteers for millennia to impregnate animus objects. Here it has the cumulative effect of doing hands they seem curious and very much alive. These tiny choreographies give the appearance of personality and intelligence. They are the functional difference between a random row of industrial robots and the coordinated movements of the intelligent package behavior.