Affective Movement in Robotic Art: Alternatives to the ‘Interiority Paradigm’ in Social Robotics

This paper critically evaluates how emotional and intentional movement is conceptualised and deployed in social robotics and provides an alternative by analysing contemporary robotic artworks that deal with affective human-robot interaction(HRI). Within HRI, movement as a way of communicating emotions and intent has become a topic of increased interest, which has made social robotics turn to theatre and dance due to the expertise of these fields in expressive movement. This paper will argue that social robotics’ way of using performative methods with regards to emotional movement is, nonetheless, limited and carries certain challenges. These challenges are grounded on the claim that social robotics participates in what the author calls an ‘interiority paradigm’. That is, movement is understood to be the expression of inner, pre-determined states. The 'interiority paradigm' poses several challenges to the development of emotional movement, with regards to unaddressed human and robotic imaginaries, an emphasis in legibility and familiarity, and a restrictive interior/exterior binary that limits the role of movement in an affective connection. As an example of how robots could be imagined beyond this interiority paradigm, the author proposes to turn to contemporary robotic art. Robotic art’s view on affective movement as a matter of evocation and of performative co-creation might inspire the development of robots that move beyond the requirement of being mere copies of a human interiority. While the intersection between robotics and the performing arts is a fruitful field of research, the author argues in this paper that the way in which movement is currently being developed through performative methods has certain shortcomings, and that the perspective of robotic art on affective movement might open up a more interesting area of exploration for social robotics, as well as expose those aspects of theatre and dance that have been unaddressed in robotics.