Dancing with the Nonhuman: An Aesthetics of Encounter

Robots are set to be all around usin our workplaces and our homes; in hospitals, elderly care and schools. We are promised that they will be our drivers, couriers, receptionists, managers, soldiers, teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists and lovers. Yet, the way we imagine robots and our relations with them has been confined by a small set of assumptions and experiences. The design of robots is currently understood as an engineering task, but looking to a future where we live with robots, roboticists are not only engineering machines but also the fabric of our future society. This is most obvious in social robots that mimic humans or pets, often in cute or stereotypically gendered ways. This design of social robots deliberately blurs the difference between biological and mechanical bodies for the purpose of eliciting human emotions. Dancing with the Nonhuman puts forward an alternative vision embracing the unique machine characteristics of robots to create new opportunities for expanding our experiences with non-humanlike machines. The projects novel hypothesis is that movement rather than appearance is at the centre of relation-making, and that social agency is not a pre-given property but is enacted in the encounter. The space for possibility thus materializes in the interaction. This perspective shifts the focus from representation to performativity, and in doing so, challenges the assumption that robots require familiar humanlike or animal-like forms to become affective social actors. Dancing with the Nonhuman will bring together a team of experts from creative robotics and choreography to develop a unique arts-based methodology to study the aesthetic and social potential of movement and performance-making for human-robot interaction. The project will deliver a new methodology, which develops a corporeal interface in the form of a technically extended costume to give dancers an intimate embodied insight into the machine morphology and perceptual world to develop a movement language for robots, which supports aesthetic and social connection-making, without relying on human likeness. The project will integrate this mapping method in an experimental practice of performance- making that aesthetically expands human-machine encounters by probing into rigid subject-object boundaries and rendering them elastic. This research re-imagines the design of robots and the ways they are woven into our social fabric. The project will engage the public into this important socio-cultural topic through public workshops, a symposium, and a public performance with dancers and robots, which will allow participants and audiences to experience the research findings. Given the promise that robots will affect every aspect of our daily lives, the potential social and cultural benefits of better understanding human-robot relations cannot be overstated.

The research project 'Dancing with the Nonhuman: an Aesthetics of Encounter' established a novel performance-making practice that explores the aesthetic potential of human-robot relationships through embodied attunement. It innovatively employed dance techniques and choreographic strategies to reimagine our relation-making with machines, challenging common approaches and assumptions in human-robot interaction design. How we imagine robots and the future narratives they are embedded in matters-socially, politically, and ethically. Many of our current human-robot relationships echo dominant narratives that validate social hierarchies based on notions of difference. This project challenged these prevailing assumptions and the tendency to render social robots as humanlike as possible, by harnessing dancers' movement skills to explore the social and affective potential of abstract, non-humanlike robots. The transdisciplinary practice integrated a critical, feminist framework with experimental choreography and creative robotics to explore how transcorporeal empathy can open up alternative, embodied ways for meaning-making with social machines, without relying on humanlike appearance. The team employed abstract, cube-shaped wearable costumes, extended through generative sound to provide additional feedback to the dancers. The dancers' entanglements with the costumes informed how our cube-shaped robot learns to move in relational and affective ways. This innovative practice served as a hybrid playground for exploring meaningful relations with non-humanlike artifacts through contact improvisation and playful choreographic strategies. To evaluate this approach, the team developed an improvisational performance installation featuring two dancers, two cube costumes, and one cube robot. The piece premiered in Sydney in 2022, with a final iteration in Vienna in 2023, titled 'Dancing with the Nonhuman |VIE-2-2-1|'. The performance tells a story of a more-than-human encounter with cube artefacts becoming co-performers. Dancers and cubes mingle and extend each other, creating delicate alliances, and transforming in response. The final stage invites audiences to participate and explore this playful tangle from within. Audience feedback suggests our work made a tangible impact on cultivating sensitivity to the dynamics of human-robot relations, validating the efficacy of our approach in promoting a bodily understanding of the affective potential of non-humanlike machines. As robots become increasingly integrated into our lives, 'Dancing with the Nonhuman' calls for a more nuanced, embodied, and aesthetic understanding of our encounters with social machines. This methodology, at the nexus of dance, robotics, AI, and feminist theory, reimagines how robots can look and behave and how we need to rethink the ethics and politics of designing human-robot relationships. The project advances creative robotics and dance research and advocates for a more inclusive and diverse future with robot co-workers and companions.