How does it feel when a robot looks you in the eye? In July Michael Garbutt and I recorded a conversation on the robot gaze (following our chat in May about invocational media). The possibility of a robot gaze exposes the ambiguity over the status of the robot as a being or a thing. If it is capable of a gaze, then it has some level of agency in constituting the subjectivity of those present, whether or not it is itself sentient. This is surely the geopsychological foundations of the uncanny valley: the sense of presence, or co-presence of something that looks back. This inscrutable perceiving entity may seem to deliver Lacan’s (1979) castrating gaze, Sartre’s (1984) shaming gaze, or Foucault’s (1975) examining gaze, and possibly without any referral to a human gaze at all.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aVF_pCXrm8&w=560&h=315]
This discussion came out of a paper that Fiona Andreallo and I wrote on the robot eye, vision and gaze, and I presented at the Beyond Anthropomorphism symposium at the University of Sydney, and presented in a new form at the International Association of Media and Communication Research conference in Madrid.
Foucault, M. (1975). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. New York: Vintage Books.
Lacan, Jacques (1979 [1964]) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1984) Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.
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