Category: Theory
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Toy robots on YouTube: Consumption and peer production at the robotic moment
Robots are increasingly prominent in the popular imagination, partly through people playing with toys and using social media. This article examines a selection of user-created YouTube videos in different genres that reveal how people experiment with toy robots such as the Furby.
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Self-designing resilient robot gaits
The robot from Cornell University in this video ‘generates a conception of itself’ and improvises ways of moving around. At startup, the design has been left incomplete, and the robot itself finishes the design.
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Economies of the gait in robotics and animation
How a robot walks, runs and jumps is critical to how it moves through its environment. Beyond these instrumental questions, how a robot moves can’t help establishing a sense of its perceived character. We’ve faced these questions of movement, embodiment and identity before — in animation.
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Digital Humanities meets Robotic Humanities
On Friday December 10, I suggested a new term for our field of research: Robotic Humanities, the deployment of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences traditions in field of robotics (see my slides). Of course this Robot/Arts intersection is not new at all, as Simon Penny will talk about this Friday.
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Making robots real (with help from Latour)
Cultural robotics needs a theory to account for the ways technological problems, such as robotics, are constantly defined, redefined and distributed across society. Robotics is already embedded in a social history of technology, drawing on black-boxed elements from technological legacies that deal with the problems of propulsion and control — how to get things to…