Something that I really love and appreciate about you is just how sweet you are.
I’m sure you have just as many questions as I did when I first saw this robot stripper.
To address some of them:
yes, it is pretty creepy, and yes, it does have a CCTV camera as its face.
But
unlike the unintentionally creepy silicone sexbots
that seem to be taking the world by storm,
which try, and fail miserably, to mimic life, there’s something bizarrely human about this robot.
And that’s what the man who built it was hoping to achieve.
My name is Giles Walker. I’ve been making sculptures for about 27 years.
And he’s been making robot pole dancers for 10.
hey were originally built as an uncomfortable commentary about the pervasiveness of technology
that you just can’t seem to get your eyes off.
But then they became famous.
First online following viral tweet back in 2017.
And then offline when two of Giles’ pole dancers debuted on the stage of the world's largest strip club –
the Sapphire Gentlemen's Club in Las Vegas.
as part of the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show or CES.
The pole dancers, they’ve become sort of, well, they’ve become iconic, but they’re also like my sort of Christmas
jingle, where everyone just wants them and people tend to focus on them.
That’s what’s been the interesting thing about these pole dancers is that even though I built them 10 years ago,
for something completely different,
they’ve now kind of taken on a new role.
That became really apparent in Las Vegas this year when I went over there,
alking to the press about sex bots – something which I don’t really know anything about,
they weren’t sex bots, they were something completely different, about something completely different,
but then my art has evolved into something that is current.
And funnily enough, since Las Vegas, I’ve been approached by quite a few people
to actually make a sort of more advanced version of the pole-dancing robots.
I spent some time with Giles in his London studio.
I was curious to see how what essentially started as a scrap art sculpture became the talking and twerking
beast that it is today.
It’s the same as the pole-dancers – it’s got, like, CCTV head, kind of a plastic white,
maybe pearl, body pieces.
Holding onto a pole, standing on a sort of platform,
wheeling its hips, going down, doing the twerk, orgasming.
Giles is aware of how uncomfortable that sounds. And he wants to talk about it.
The Westworld-style sexbot revolution is coming and we all need to come to terms
with just how awkward and problematic it is.
I think the relationship between a stripper, or pole dancer, and
the client
is an interesting one because some strippers feel empowered,
and then the other side of the argument is that it’s degrading to women – generally.
It’s just a contentious issue, isn’t it?
You know, the same with CCTV cameras, in some ways, it’s like, some people feel safer with them
and other people find it intrusive.
And on a, sort of like a technical challenge, it was interesting trying to make something
look half decent, because I didn’t want to make a pole dancer that, you know, clunking away.
I wanted to make it look good and be a good pole dancer, so that was a challenge in itself.
Giles was originally reluctant to have his work of art usurped by the sex industry’s tech merger.
Then again, even though his robots have CCTV cameras instead of faces and deliberately unfinished bodies
made up of mannequin parts, there is something unpredictable and, well, kind of human about them.
That’s sort of what the real robots lack is, you know, they don’t program in, I don’t think, those kind of
those kind of twitches that make us all sort of human, really.
Because I’ve build things, normally, on such a small budget, you know, you just have to make sure that
the sort of movement is there.
You know, whether it’s static movement, as in the hand position, like if you have hands like that then
like that then your robot looks pretty stiff, but if you’ve got hands doing that, you can do more things with them.
That's all it is really, in the hands.
So I’ve kind of become obsessed with gesture, I think is what they call it.
He took some candy out of the store and got caught.
The way they twitch their foot when they talk.
All these things, the very small movements, small motors, but they say a lot about someone.
That’s the unknown, which is actually the fun bit because it all fires up and then does something
weird and you think, “oh, yeah, that’s who that one is.”
You obviously know that I'm horny
And that we'd probably have a lot
of fun together.
If you sort of compare the sort of call in robots, if you want, that I make
with, say, the £30m
projects you see being made in Japan, that, to me, they are the walking dead – they have no gesture,
they have no characterization.
Very precise movements, very well made, very expensive, but I think mine, sort of, say more.
Giles has built hundreds of sculptures over the years, but none have been as provocative
or popular as the pole dancers.
What’s ironic is when he first built them, they were mostly intended as a warning about technology
infiltrating our private lives.
I built them about 10 years ago
and the idea behind it at the time was
they were introducing all these CCTV cameras into London and Britain was becoming the most
surveilled society in the world.
That got me thinking and then sort of the idea of sort of voyeurism, who has –
the watcher and the one being watched.
And sort of those two ideas sort of merged into this idea of doing a
pole dancer with a CCTV camera head.
Today his sculptures, CCTV heads and all,
are addressing much more complicated ethical questions –
should we be using robots for sex, and if so, how do we deal with the unavoidable creepiness that
comes with that reality?
Giles isn’t entirely sure. It seems that he never expected to be building the kind of sculptures
he’s building today.
But his approach to art has always been to reflect what’s wrong with society with a sense of humor.
This culminated in his latest pole dancer, which is both sleeker and rauncher
than its predecessors.
But even though it will talk dirty and maybe even twerk for you,
it’s the inescapable centrality of its CCTV head gazing right at you,
almost seeing through you, that adds that crucial sense of self-awareness that makes
the larger message about where we’re headed stick.
Literally.
I'm probably pretty wet already just hearing you describe what you're going to do to me.