Encounters, Anecdotes and Insights-Prosthetics, Robotics and Art

Abstract

Performing with prosthetic attachments and robotic extensions, the artist’s body becomes an operational system that combines improvised actions with involuntaryand automated motions. The body interfaced and interacting with machines, experiences its own movements as machinic. Using anecdotes, insights and references to my own practice, as well as to recent developments in robotics for medical, industrial and military uses, there is a discussion of the issues and ethics of human-robot interaction. Notions of aliveness, embodiment and agency become problematic. The hybridization of robotics and art generates contestable futures of form, function and aesthetics. Possibilities that can be actualized, interrogated, evaluated and possibly appropriated. Alternate anatomical architectures are engineered, experienced and interrogated.