Robots: Asleep, Awake, Alone, and in Love

In Chapter 5 we look at the use of robots in recent theatre and argue that, in some cases, robots are ideal vehicles for performance based on new media dramaturgy as they can translate between the informatic and the organic, facilitating meaningful transactions between human visitors and autonomous or semi-autonomous machine. But they also raise significant questions about aesthetic representation and audience response. The chapter considers recent work in creative robotics, which gestures towards something beyond the robotics of industrial design and performance based on efficiency (speed and productivity) and beyond the comparatively simple question of the representation of robotics in the world. This involves a rediscovery of the larger representational function of robotics in imaging the enhanced qualities of human experience rather than simply its visual manifestations. We argue, through analyses of robot and android theatre works by Hirata Oriza and Ishiguro Hiroshi, Mari Velonaki, and Kris Verdonck, that the experience and meaning generated by this work is a result of the entire system’s design and dramaturgy and that it is dramaturgically constituted as a result of the interactions between entities rather than as a feature of one or more of the constituent entities. Recent work that explores what Braidotti calls ‘a displacement of the lines of demarcation … between the organic and the inorganic’ (The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge: 2013, 89) is also discussed in reference to theorising a political perspective on NMD and robotics. In short, we demonstrate that we do not need identifiably human actors as guarantors of meaning and intimacy either in robotics or in performance.