SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: OK, so that's class 4.
SPEAKER 1: Hold on.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: OK.
SPEAKER 1: I'm going to do that.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: - About two years ago, we had a hypothesis.
Oh, I get it.
No, Spot Me Up should go there.
Teaching roboticists choreography
would help them make more nuanced decisions in terms
of human robot interfaces.
Spot Me Up should be in class four
because that's the one where they use the dog
thing to be Mick Jagger.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Right.
Yeah.
No, I think that actually does make sense in class 4.
We had a sense that dance breaks robots.
Welcome to Choreo Robotics 0101.
We created a 12-week course.
Every one of the classes here in [INAUDIBLE]
is going to have some kind of movement
component of some kind.
That ingratiate dance theory.
Let's start by walking around the room
in no particular order.
With advanced technologies of robotic movement
and expression.
I just want you to go ahead, and walk around,
and make observations about you in the space in this time.
It's the most bananas course I've ever had a hand in.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 2: How do you do that?
SPEAKER 3: Yeah, that's what I was just-- would do.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: And so in working with Stephanie Tellex
and her phenomenal lab at the computer science department,
we started thinking like, how can we
create a course that simultaneously contends
with emerging technologies of robotic motion planning,
literally how robots move?
Setting a certain foot pattern.
And then adding arms on top of the foot pattern.
And then adding head to the arms to the foot pattern.
And choreography, which is the art of making things move.
Like for example, they do the twerk,
but we want the head to be doing something specific while we're
doing the twerk.
And choreography was an ideal hotbed
to test robots' abilities to interface
with humans in the most complex arenas possible.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What kinds of dances do you think
the robot would be good at?
This class was an intra-university effort.
I'm curious your thoughts on the governing kind of logics
and tensions here across choreography
and what we're understanding is computation.
That spanned the theater arts and performance studies
department.
SPEAKER 3: Welcome to our first lab day.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: The computer science department.
The center for research and choreographic interfaces,
which is an initiative of the Brown Arts Institute.
SPEAKER 4: It's really definitely meant
to be kind of a collaborative experience
for us to kind of learn together.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Eric Rosen was my co-teacher
for this first year.
He's a graduate student here at Brown.
And he was instrumental in the assembling
of the robotic technologies and pedagogy in play.
SPEAKER 4: If I use this joystick and move left
and right, I can rotate it.
SPEAKER 1: So I think one of the things that keeps coming up
in all of your thoughts is what it means to actually concretize
a way of being.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Madeleine
was the project manager for the class.
She put together all of the different technologies,
and bodies, and space that needed to be assembled
to actually have a class.
As you cross people in the space, without saying anything,
I want you to go in for the high five a your choice.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So when we were planning the course--
as with all things in this class,
it's not just about doing cool shit with robots.
We started to think about individual artists.
It's about understanding the politics and implication
of making robots do really anything.
Choreographers who are already working across this Venn
diagram of emerging technologies and political concern.
There's a great deal of colonial and militarized violence
in Puerto Rico.
The one artist that we knew we had to work with-- it's
a deep stack of very, very hard.
Was Yanira Castro.
SPEAKER 1: Hello, Yanira.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Yanira is a movement artist,
who not only works with emerging technologies of all sorts.
YANIRA CASTRO: At the intersection
of performance, and technology, and social practice.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: But she's specifically interested in how
the politics of these technologies
shape what performances are possible.
YANIRA CASTRO: So what that means is every single project
looks very different from the last.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 5: I mean, the general idea
was to make sure that this pet can access every point.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: And so for this class--
YANIRA CASTRO: A lot of the questions
around all of these pieces for me is about self determination.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Yanira asked
us to create a robot capable of playing a guiro.
YANIRA CASTRO: It is a gourd that's been dried
and has these score marks.
In Puerto Rico and only in Puerto Rico
does it have a cone.
Players keep saying over and over again,
the instrument is the cone.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: The ways that the comb interfaces
with the gourd, with the guiro.
YANIRA CASTRO: This operation over here is secondary to this.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Incredibly complex.
YANIRA CASTRO: So it's complicated what they're doing.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: All sorts of nuance and geometry.
YANIRA CASTRO: There is articulation
that you've created with the guiro already that does
mimic what they do, actually.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: So not only was
this like an incredible technical challenge--
[ALL CHEERING]
--musical instruments already, they
are their own technologies with their own histories.
YANIRA CASTRO: It serves as the foundation
of much revolutionary music.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: The guiro is a specific instrument
relative to a Puerto Rican anti-colonial context.
YANIRA CASTRO: So the way you got news across
was that you would sing it.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: This is a musical instrument
that has a politics.
YANIRA CASTRO: This is how you spread, essentially.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: Just like the robots
that we're deploying.
YANIRA CASTRO: I'm having this very complex relationship
to this instrument.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: And what Yanira
was planning for us was to juxtapose the histories
and politics of this musical instrument.
YANIRA CASTRO: What is the power and
self-determination questions.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: With the histories and technologies
of a robotic apparatus.
YANIRA CASTRO: This is all still happening to me.
It's not answered that this instrument brings up.
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: And the results were astonishing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
YANIRA CASTRO: We wanted to just start with the score
for all of us to engage in it however we understand it.
Well, somewhat we wanted to read it for.
SPEAKER 6: [INAUDIBLE] that is distinct from everyone
else in the circle.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SYDNEY A. SKYBETTER: I'm in a performance studies department.
My job is to imbue in my students
an appreciation of the political complexities of performance.
Now, who wants to go first?
And robots are political objects.
They exist in relation to politics, and economy,
and surveillance, and violence, and hegemony, and institutions,
and all sorts of really complicated ways.
The floor is yours.
And so this course was a way to, yes, make robots dance and do
all sorts of cool shit with robots, right?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If you don't want to see me see dancing with somebody.
This is another opening, I think,
to have a series of really challenging conversations
about the role of technology in our lives.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If you want to believe that anything could stop
me.
It's not just for performance.
It's not just for war fighting.
It exists across these planes, always in simultaneously.
That complexity, that ambivalence, I think,
is where this course lives.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I want to dance with somebody.
With somebody who loves me.
[INDISTINCT CHATTERS]
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Oh, man, do I have follow up questions.
[LAUGHS]