The Human-Robot Experience (HRX) Theatre Workshop is a product of the Machine Movement Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration weaving together creative robotics, choreography, and dance, grounded in new materialism. This arts-led practice seeks to transcend binary frameworks in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) by cultivating a posthuman experience through developing an embodied lens to look at our interactions not as fixed and predefined but as emergent, dynamic relationships.
The workshop aims to generate a deeper, embodied understanding of our more-than-human experiences with machines by deconstructing traditional perspectives in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and attending to emergent and nuanced connections between human and nonhuman bodies. Human-Robot Experience (HRX), instead, explores the rich social potential of more-than-human encounters with machinelike artefacts, rather than humanlike machines designed to blur the differences between humans and machine-things.
Our process unfolds as a participatory choreographic journey that brings together creative, critical robotics and embodied, choreographic knowledges. We begin with movement explorations to get into our bodies, expand our bodily awareness, and slowly expand this awareness to resonate with the machinelike artefacts.
The subsequent stage extends these explorations using the Relational Body Mapping (RBM) method, a technique derived from our Machine Movement Lab practice. RBM employs costumes that embody the material and spatial affordances of robots-in-the-making to feel into different bodies and facilitate transcorporeal (human and nonhuman) perspective-taking. This immersive exploration includes an auditory dimension, supporting participants’ sensory experience and meaning-making by generating an interactive soundscape as they move with the artefacts.
In the final stage, participants collaboratively construct and enact inclusive human-robot scenarios that matter to them while engaging with questions of agency, affect, trust, and dependency. This immersive approach seeks to cultivate an inclusive and diverse perspective that transcends traditional, often exclusive, anthropocentric views by actively generating transcorporeal, more-than-human perspectives.
Discussions, reflections, and the use of a novel 'more-than-human body-map' tool to capture participants' bodily sensations and experiences with machine-like artefacts, will serve to further delve into our experiences.
The HRX Theatre Workshop will foster a collaborative creative space where embodied knowledge and participatory experiences converge to reshape our understanding of the evolving relationships with technology in a more-than-human context.
NOTE:
We recommend that participants bring water, lunch or a snack, and comfortable clothing suitable for movement activities.”
PRESENTERS:
Petra Gemeinboeck, Swinburne University, AU
Rob Saunders, Leiden University, NL
Audrey Rochette, University of Quebec, CA
Steph Hutchison, Queensland University of Technology, AU
