MOTION RESEARCH: Performing and Designing with Human-robot Collaborative Movements and Choreographies.

Description

Movement-based technologies have been used by performers and artists to extend thestage and installation space beyond the static aspects of a piece to a more dynamicinteraction in time using effectors in the environment. These programmable movementactuators have often resembled the concept of robotics, although the original intention ofserving human needs have now been supplanted by generations of social robots thathave human-like behavioral attributes whose designs go beyond merely responding-to-requests,to interacting socially in a human environment. Recent works have increasingly applied state-of-the-art movement technologies toperformance and exhibition, enabling narratives of how humans interact with machinesin an increasingly technological future. However, on the robotics side, these works tendto frame machines as static, working, obedient, and sometimes threatening entities,contrary to recent advances in human-machine social interaction. Instead of using themetaphor of robots as subservient to human needs, we broaden the narrative to showhow humans and machines can be collaborative partners in creative performance thatutilizes nonverbal movement gestures as common media of communication. Thiscollaborative interaction requires knowing how human performers perceive machineinteractions, how to design machine movements in reaction to human movements, andhow to choreograph human-machine interactions in spatial terms into compellingnarratives. In this practice-based research proposal, we will create movements and interactions forrobotic devices for performance and exhibition-performance contexts by co-designingwith local performers in the dance and experimental media community. We willinterview and prototype with a cohort of 25 leading movement artists in Hong Kong in aseries of co-design workshops with robotic arms of different scales, to understand howperformers perceive working creatively with movement technologies, to facilitate thedesign of robotic movements, and to create improvised and choreographed workflows formovement sequences of humans and robots in a collaborative space. The workshopprototypes are tested with audience-centered focus groups on three aspects ofperformance: dance, conceptual performance, and exhibition-performance. Insights fromthe focus groups will be qualitatively analyzed and applied to the three research andartistic outputs of the project: a human-machine dance performance, journal andconference papers on perception and design of robotic arm movements, and a galleryexhibition that allows general audiences to participate by modulating performer-machineinteraction in space. The outcomes from this work provides guidelines for design of performer-machineinteractions in increasingly prominent performance technology communities, drawingattention to social interactions of robots in human everyday life.