Unbecoming Robot: Prototyping Brokenness in Japanese Performing Arts and Social Robotics

My PhD thesis attends to broken robots in Japanese theatre and art performances. I investigate the aesthetics and politics of erratic robotic embodiments, which deviate from conventional archetypes of robots as impeccable and obedient machines. Building upon critiques on the coloniality of dehumanized and gendered identities ascribed to mechanical laborers (by scholars such as Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei and Neda Atanasoski and Vora Kalindi), I disentangle how the colonial registers of the master-slave relation are still encoded in human-robot relation, and how they keep on perpetuating the surrogate condition of the less-than-human bodies. However, manifestations of robot malfunction in Japanese performing arts disrupt such hierarchical bonds. Nonetheless, the portrayal of robots as empathy-worthy objects in Japanese performing arts are closely intertwined with governmental policies advocating the use of robots as substitutes for foreign labor within care industries. My research delineates how robotic failure and recalcitrance act as forms of resistance, challenging the deep-seated master-slave dynamism, but also unveils problematic politics of mobilizing the artistic fabulation of robotic failure in designing and implementing social robotic products.

My research engages with the interdisciplinary approach overarching Japanese studies (by Jennifer Robertson, Kazuno Hirofumi, and Esperanza Miyake), performance studies (by Jon McKenzie), queer studies (by Jack Halberstam), feminist science and technology studies (by Karen Barad and Luciana Parisi), religious studies (by Fabio Rambelli), and critical infrastructure study (by Arjun Appadurai), to elaborate intricacies of embodying failure in robotic art and social robotics in Japan. Serving as experimental platforms for future social robotic applications, Japanese performing arts demonstrate that robots exhibiting flaws invoke a heightened empathetic response from the audience, suggesting that imperfection could be a key element in creating “natural” exchanges between humans and machines. As such, artistic embodiments of broken robots not only enact critiques on stereotypical robot servants but are also aligned with the utilitarian objectives of social robotics to create more endearing and socially acceptable machines for broader implementation. Crystalized as design heuristics, the mechanism of robot vulnerability is deliberately incorporated in social robotics to broaden robots’ integration into the social fabrics. Thus, my thesis unfolds nuanced tensions and complex interplay across two dimensions: Firstly, robotic failures are enacted as artistic critique and queer fabulation, and secondly, robot dysfunctions are reintegrated into the strategic approach to enhance social robots’ public adoption, coinciding with the progressive and pragmatic imperatives of governmental and industrial sectors. Resilient generativity and the system’s re-capturing are also thought as intersecting each other, forming an ever-transforming dynamism.

My thesis is structured around four emerging robot identities that gradually take over old servomechanical stereotypes: Robots characterized as fallible, indeterminate, salvific, and wild. Each of the case study delineates intersectional elements in shaping these alternative social robot images. I ask: 1) How do these robot (non)performances disrupt paradigms of domination based on artistic methodologies and philosophies? 2) What does the paradigm shift mean when artistic fabulation of marginalized identities are co-opted by design heuristics and application design in social robotics? 3) How are these experimental art performances mobilized by Japan’s national identity “branding” as a highly technological nation? I explore how “intersectionality” as both the method and the conceptual framework can be productive for addressing entangled conditions of ethnicity, gender, disability, catastrophe, religion, and biopolitics, in co-shaping these new tropes of social robotic identities. The research aims to account for the ambiguity of reimagining human-robot rapport and mutual care through failures and fallibility instead of utility and serviceability, and critically addresses emerging complexities of such paradigm shift.

Keywords: Social robotics, performing art, Japan, brokenness, alternative human-robot interaction