Anthropocentricity and the social robot: Artistic and aesthetic investigations into machine behaviours

This paper discusses the notion of anthropomorphism and perceived behaviours in the social robots from the biased view of several artistic robotic installations and performances. The author presents these observations as a source of inspiration for embedding behaviours in robots. Investigating anthropocentricism, these works mix machines from the very abstract geometric to the very representative zoomorphic shapes. The robot was exploited as the medium in atypical human analogies and situations. In La Cour des Miracles, we staged the misery of the machine. In L’Assemblee, 48 robotic arms gather in an arena to create crowd behaviours. In Armageddon, robots were Angels and God’s messengers while in Devolution, they were part of a biological metaphor with dancers. As we attribute intent to outside agents that act upon the physical world1 , one might question the level of anthropomorphism needed in social robots2 and also reflect if this projection is an inevitable reflex or not.3 Social robots have mainly embraced the humanoids with friendly behaviours as the mode of intercommunication4 , should we further ask, if this alley channels the potential of the robot intelligence.