The Rhythm of the Robot
Authors Anne-Sofie Belling and Daniel Buzzo with the University of the West of England.
This work-in-progress paper describes an investigation into the somaesthetic qualities of exploring posthuman strategies and relations with technology.
This investigation was conducted through embodied design ideation, autoethnographic bodystorming and physical prototyping, casting soft robots directly onto the body.
This led to the soft robotic prototype and speculative concept, Nautica.
Nautica explores the concept of an embodied navigation system, where the entanglement of human, robot and digital navigation system is explored on the human body.
Nautica is designed as two robotic arms curled around the left and right side of the torso.
The left or right soft robotic arm squeezes the side of the torso according to instructions given by a digital navigation system, encouraging the wearer in the specified direction.
Nautica is developed to probe the evolution of the human body through exploring the material and temporal qualities of soft robotics, an emerging field of robotics research.
The Nautica prototype was tested directly on the designer-researcher's body over a short-term adoptive study
This led to discerning preliminary emergent properties as “material” commonalities between the wearer and robot emerged due to the materiality and behavior of soft robots.
For example, whilst wearing Nautica for longer periods of time, heat became a temporal and sensory signifier of relations between human and soft robot.
As the soft robot absorbed the heat of the designer-researcher’s body, the demarcated border between the body and robot was experienced as more dissolved and ambiguous.
This triggered a cognitive dissonance between what was experienced as human and nonhuman, organic and artificial.
This is a vivid example of the interface becoming an interlace, expressing a weaving together of two systems becoming one rather than an interface being the interstitial space between them.
A second property related to the temporal form of the robot which evoked connotations of being made intimate with the pulsating and breathing life of another being.
This led to discerning preliminary emergent properties as “material” commonalities between the wearer and robot emerged due to the materiality and behavior of soft robots.
With Nautica cast directly on the body, the cyclical rhythms of the robot inflating and deflating on the designer-researcher’s body were entangled in the bodily cyclical rhythms of her own breathing and heartbeat.
Reflecting on the idea of listening to the cyclical rhythm of the robot unlocked an alien experience of technology as facilitating mixed reality relations between human, robot and virtual navigation system.
In closing, this research served as an exploration into how speculative and artistic implementations of emerging technologies can be used to deconstruct and recalibrate human entanglements with technology and their surroundings.
Furthermore, the Nautica research project demonstrated how artistic practice can be of benefit when constructing soft robots as it is difficult to accurately predict the temporal behavior of soft robots prior to construction.
Therefore, processes of learning-by-doing and hands-on experiments were essential to the epistemic and developmental process of constructing soft robotics.
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