Difference-in-relation: Diffracting human-robot encounters
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v3i1.38958Keywords:
Human-robot interaction; Diffraction; Reflection; Performative practice; Entanglement; Transcorporeality; Performance.Abstract
This article adopts Donna Haraway’s (1992) and Karen Barad’s (2007) lenses of reflection and diffraction to probe into human-robot relationships in-the-making. Dominant practices of human-robot interaction aspire to an optics of reflection based on the belief that the differences inherent to machines need masking or assimilating. I propose that diffracting human-robot encounters requires becoming-with and co-worlding with artefacts and their asymmetries. Entering the robot lab to witness my collaborative Machine Movement Lab project and its diffractive strategies in-the-making, as well as the material-bodily knowledges they enact, offers situated insights into how they make tangible difference patterns and relational ontologies at work in our more-than-human encounters.
Downloads
References
Alač, Morana (2016). Social Robots: Things or Agents? AI & Society, 31(4), 519–535. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0631-6
Alaimo, Stacey (2010). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press.
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
Broadbent, Elizabeth (2017). Interactions with robots: The truths we reveal about ourselves. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 627–652. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-043958
Castañeda, Claudia and Suchman, Lucy (2014). Robot visions. Social Studies of Science, 44(3), 315–341. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312713511868
Dautenhahn, Kerstin (2013). Human-robot interaction. In M. Soegaard & R. F. Dam (Eds.), Encyclopedia of human-computer interaction (2nd ed., pp. 2283–2366). The Interaction Design Foundation.
de Graaf, Maartje M. A. and Ben Allouch, Somaya (2013). Exploring influencing variables for the acceptance of social robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 61(12), 1476–1486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2013.07.007
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Despret, Vinciane (2013). Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human–Animal Worlds. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(8), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413496852
euRobotics (2013). Strategic Research Agenda for Robotics in Europe 2014--2020. Retrived November 16, 2021. https://www.eu-robotics.net/cms/upload/topic_groups/SRA2020_SPARC.pdf
Fuchs, Thomas (2016). Intercorporeality and Interaffectivity. In C. Meyer, J. Streeck, & S. Jordan (Eds.), Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction. Oxford University Press.
Fuchs, Thomas and Koch, Sabine (2014). Embodied Affectivity: On Moving and Being Moved. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00508
Gemeinboeck, Petra and Saunders, Rob (2016). The performance of creative machines. In J.T. K. V. Koh, B. J. Dunstan, D. Silvera-Tawil & M. Velonaki (Eds.), Cultural Robotics. Lecture notes in computer science 9549 (pp. 159–172). Springer.
Gemeinboeck, Petra (2021). The Aesthetics of Encounter: A Relational-Performative Design Approach to Human-Robot Interaction. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frobt.2020.577900
Gemeinboeck, Petra and Saunders, Rob (2021). Moving beyond the mirror: relational and performative meaning making in human-robot communication. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01212-1
Glinska, Gosia (2020). The Rise of Social Robots: How AI Can Help Us Flourish. Newswise.Com. Retrieved November 18, 2021. https://www.newswise.com/articles/the-rise-of-social-robots-how-ai-can-help-us-flourish
Grosz, Elizabeth (2005). Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke University Press.
Guzman, Andrea L. (2020). Ontological boundaries between humans and computers and the implications for human-machine communication. Human-Machine Communication, 1, 37–54. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.1.3
Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. (1997). Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan©-Meets-OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1975). Poetry, Language, Thought. Harper & Row.
IEEE (n.d.). Robots. Your guide to the world of robotics. Retrieved February 17, 2022. https://robots.ieee.org/robots/kaspar/
Jones, Raya A. (2017). What makes a robot ‘social’? Social Studies of Science, 47(4), 556–579. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717704722
Latour, Bruno (1999). Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
Manning, Erin and Massumi, Brian (2014). Thought in the act: passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
Mindell, David A. (2015). Our robots, ourselves: Robotics and the myths of autonomy. Viking.
Nakamura, Lisa (2003). Prospects for a Materialist Informatics: An Interview with Donna Haraway. In M. Bousquet & K. Wills (Eds.), The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change (pp. 154–168). Alt-X Press.
PARO Robots (n.d.) PARO Therapeutic Robot. Retrieved February 17, 2022. http://www.parorobots.com/
Robertson, Jennifer (2010). Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan. Body and Society, 16, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X10364767
Robertson, Jennifer (2017). Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation. University of California Press.
Sabanović, Selma (2010). Robots in society, society in robots: mutual shaping of society and technology as a framework for social robot design. International Journal of Social Robotics, 2(4), 439–450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-010-0066-7
Sandry, Eleanor (2016). The potential of otherness in robotic art. In D. Herath, C. Kroos, & Stelarc (Eds.), Robots and Art: Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis (pp. 177–189). Springer.
SoftBank Robotics US (2016, May 17). SoftBank Robotics Meet Pepper [Video file]. YouTube. Retrieved February 17, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDeQCIkrLvc
SoftBank Robotics (2017) How to Create a Great Experience with Pepper. Retrieved November 12, 2021. http://doc.aldebaran.com/download/Pepper_B2BD_guidelines_Sept_V1.5.pdf
Søraa, Roger A. (2017). Mechanical genders: how do humans gender robots? Gender, Technology and Development, 21(1--2), 99–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/09718524.2017.1385320
Stacey, Jackie and Suchman, Lucy (2012). Animation and Automation: The liveliness and labours of bodies and machines. Body and Society, 18(1), 1–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X11431845
Stewart, Kathleen (2010). Worlding Refrains. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 339–353). Duke University Press.
Suchman, Lucy (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, Lucy (2011). Subjects Objects. Feminist Theory, 12(2), 119–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700111404205
Suchman, Lucy (2020). Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations*. In Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics (pp. 361–375). Routledge.
Taylor, Chloe (2019). Robots could take over 20 million jobs by 2030, study claims. CNBC. Retrieved November 14, 2021 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/robots-could-take-over-20-million-jobs-by-2030-study-claims.html
Treusch, Pat (2020). Robotic Knitting Re-Crafting Human-Robot Collaboration Through Careful Coboting. transcript Verlag.
Van Roy, Vincent, Rossetti, Fiammetta, Perset, Karine, and Galindo-Romero, Laura (2021). AI Watch - National strategies on Artificial Intelligence: A European perspective, 2021 edition.
von Laban, Rudolf (1966). Choreutics. Macdonald & Evans.
von Uexküll, Jakob (1957). A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. In C. H. Schiller (Ed.), Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept (pp. 5–80). International Universities Press.
Wajcman, Judy (2017). Automation: is it really different this time? The British Journal of Sociology, 68(1), 119–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12239
Ziemke, Tom and Sharkey, Neil (2001). A stroll through the worlds of robots and animals. Semiotica, 13(1), 701–746. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2001.050
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication.
- Texts will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work, provided they include an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship, its initial publication in this journal and the terms of the license.
