Robotics by Chris Chesher
Social Robots with AI: Prospects, Risks and Responsible Methods. Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2024 IOS Press. , 2025
This article explores the roles of human and non-human emotional labour in restaurant environment... more This article explores the roles of human and non-human emotional labour in restaurant environments, with a specific focus on Softbank's Pepper Parlor concept café in Tokyo. Adopting a ficto-critical method by imagining the lived experience of robots based on our observations of their design and behaviour, we analyse the significance of emotion in the performance of social roles in the service contexts of the café. This study draws on observations of various robots, including Pepper, Servi, AIBO, RoBoHon and BellaBot to examine how robots are designed to perform emotional labour to affect customer experiences. We contrast this with published ethnographic accounts of human service workers experiences in restaurants. The article situates its analysis within the broader discourse on service work, addressing philosophical questions surrounding robotic sociability and emotional engagement and socioeconomic and social issues about robots potentially displacing human jobs. By integrating phenomenological robot hermeneutics with attention to contemporary advancements in AI and robotics, this paper contributes to the understanding of the role of emotion in the robotisation of hospitality and other service industries.
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2021
This article analyses three aspects of human and robotic eyes: 1) the eye as an object that evoke... more This article analyses three aspects of human and robotic eyes: 1) the eye as an object that evokes visceral reactions from observers when it is exposed or threatened; 2) the eye and brain, sensor and computer as mediators of vision and interpreters of visual worlds; and 3) the gaze as a mode of communication in interpersonal/human-robot interaction. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this article draws on neuroscience, human-robot interaction, critical humanities, feminism and film studies to interrogate these three aspects of eyes as they relate to the design, theorisation and experience of social robots. We argue that some of the meanings and imaginaries associated with biological eyes are transferred and translated into robotic eyes, vision and gaze, or eye machines, following the tendency towards anthropomorphism. These imaginaries are made visible particularly in science fiction. We argue that photography, the cinematic apparatus, digital sensors and artificial intelligence are not only engineering innovations but have also contributed to transformations in the contemporary collective visual world. Our multimethod cultural studies analysis of eye machines has relevance for cultural theorists, designers and engineers.
Robophilosophy conference, 2020
In February 2012 Robonaut R2 and Dan Burbank performed the first human-humanoid handshake in spac... more In February 2012 Robonaut R2 and Dan Burbank performed the first human-humanoid handshake in space. The handshake welcomed R2 as a crew member, engaging with the robot as a social agent rather than just a thing to be examined or controlled. In this sense, in Heidegger's terms, it is experienced neither theoretically as present-at-hand nor practically as ready-to-hand. We argue that it is instead experienced live-to-hand, given respect as an other. As such R2 is capable not only of executing programs, but also playing its part in socially choreographed rituals and everyday performances within a social gestalt.
Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society, 2018
This chapter examines the emergence of educational robotics, drawing on the philosophy of technol... more This chapter examines the emergence of educational robotics, drawing on the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon. In the 1950s, Simondon argued that the dominant understandings of technology are personified in the popular imaginings of the robot. These attitudes are polarised between simple instrumentalism, and dystopian anxiety about technology overcoming humankind. To improve the conceptualisation of technics he took an approach called mechanology, developing a suite of concepts that grasped technology in new ways: technological genesis; the margin of indetermination; lineages of abstract and concrete technologies; and the associated milieu. These concepts are useful in understanding the tradition of educational robotics starting in the 1970s, with Seymour Papert's 'turtle' robot serving as a resource for learning mathematics. Since the 1980s, LEGO's Mindstorms kits have introduced learners and consumers to robotics concepts. Since the 1990s, theorists of embodied cognition in the 2000s have made use of Mindstorms to draw attention to the limits of symbolic intelligence.
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2019
A key feature of the humanoid social robot is its face. A robot face is not simply a technical ch... more A key feature of the humanoid social robot is its face. A robot face is not simply a technical choice, as faces communicate identity, affect and interpersonal spatial relations, and can be key to perceptions about the virtuousness of the robot. To address the significance of the robot face we develop a transdisciplinary reading of faces that pits science, art and philosophy against each other to build critical knowledges that might inform designs of social robotics. Science understands face perception as a physiological, neurological and psychological process that perceives identity, emotion and spatial relations. Art provides a diverse repertoire of stylised faces in visual culture that reiterates the role of likeness, affect and social space. Art presents faces as ethically loaded, such as the war face, the blessed face and the abstracted face. Philosophy proposes the influence of a machine of faciality that abstracts the face as black holes on a white wall, invoking subjectivity and signifiance. In the second half of the paper we use qualitative visual analysis to develop a classification of robot faces: realistic; symbolic; blank; tech; and screen. We argue that design choice has philosophical, aesthetic and ethical consequences, as people are highly sensitive to the appearance, behaviour and social space of robots and their faces.
The moving camera is a ubiquitous element in visual culture, and one that is undergoing significa... more The moving camera is a ubiquitous element in visual culture, and one that is undergoing significant change. Camera movement has traditionally been bound to the capabilities of human bodies, vehicles and physical equipment. Computer based and robotic systems are enabling changes in image genres, extending the fields of perception for viewers. Motion control systems provide much tighter control over the movement of the camera in space and time. On television , wire-suspended cameras such as Skycam and Spidercam provide aerial perspectives above sports fields and music venues. Drones bring to the image a fusion of intimacy and magical elevation. An emerging domain of vision systems is in robotics and surveillance systems that remove the human operator entirely from the production and interpretation of images. In each of these cases, the question of the subjectivity and objectivity of images is complicated.
Convergence, 2019
Robots are increasingly prominent in the popular imagination, partly through people playing with ... more 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. These devices have features that support different styles of play, which producers of YouTube clips explore in short narratives. They reveal how the intersubjective conventions for relating to robots are currently being developed. YouTube stars produce vlogs (video blogs) telling stories about their search for Furbys, unboxing them, and experimenting with the toy's playful and uncanny features. Set-piece video producers experiment with how Furbys interact with others, such as trying to communicate, confronting family pets or being destroyed with weapons. Being 'almost alive', toy robots are harbingers of autonomous technologies that have social agency.
M/C Journal Media/Culture, May 2013
Almost all industries in Australia today have adopted digital media in some way. However, uses in... more Almost all industries in Australia today have adopted digital media in some way. However, uses in large scale activities such as mining may seem to be different from others. This article looks at mining practices with a media studies approach, and concludes that, just as many other industries, mining and media have converged. Many Australian mine sites are adopting new media for communication and control to manage communication, explore for ore bodies, simulate forces, automate drilling, keep records, and make transport and command robotic. Beyond sharing similar digital devices for communication and computation, new media in mining employ characteristic digital media operations, such as numerical operation, automation and managed variability. This article examines the implications of finding that some of the most material practices have become mediated by new media. Mining has become increasingly mediated through new media technologies similar to GPS, visualisation, game remote operation, similar to those adopted in consumer home and mobile digital media.
Australia New Zealand Communications Association ANZCA Conference, Adelaide July 2012., 2012
Many approaches to Human Robot Interaction seek technical solutions to improving peoples' engagem... more Many approaches to Human Robot Interaction seek technical solutions to improving peoples' engagement with robots. This paper argues that metacommunication (Bateson's concept of communication about communication) is critical in establishing the 'robot frame'— the negotiated set of layered meanings that guide user expectations. The FURO robot at Robotworld illustrates the metacommunicative black-boxing process that may turn robots into commoditised experiences.
Digital cultures by Chris Chesher
Media International Australia, 2023
In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an i... more In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an internet sensation. People compared it to magic: invoking an uncannily competent artist-magician. We call it 'autolography' from the Greek 'automatos + logos + graphos' (self + word + drawing). Following a discourse analysis of online publications comparing autolography to magic, we analyse its enthusiastic reception from some and critique from others. We identify historical parallels and divergences between the reception of contemporary autolography and early photography: the reduction or transformation of creative labour, negotiations over intellectual property, the alleged democratisation of visual cultural production, and the association with the Western magical imagination. Both photography and autolography prompted renegotiations of artistic practices, professional identities and intellectual property laws. However, rather than being a mechanical eye on the world, autolography undermines faith in images by invoking digitally uncanny materialisations of floating signifiers from AI models.
Continuum (Accepted October 8, 2021), 2021
Searching for and selling real estate in Australia and worldwide changed this century with the pr... more Searching for and selling real estate in Australia and worldwide changed this century with the proliferation of web and mobile platforms for real estate, now often known as Realtech. These platforms offer enticing images of homes as commodities, emphasising desirable lifestyles and opportunities for renovation and capital gains. In comparison with previous advertising media, real estate platforms powerfully mediate spatiality, mobilising attraction images that intensify the experience of house hunting. Maps and floorplans, photos and videos, drone shots and 3D walkthroughs, algorithms and interaction design present buyers with complex but not unified impressions of space and place. This article provides a critical history of these changes in the cultural field of real estate in Australia with the rise of the platforms Domain and realestate.com.au. It connects these sociotechnical and industry changes with the influence of neo-liberal ideology and the framing of homes as commodities. Through a textual, visual, spatial, and content analysis of online real estate advertising in three contrasting suburbs in Sydney, Australia it observes the intensification of three dominant strategies for promoting real estate: the lifestyle image, the opportunity image, and the attraction image. It shows how these images vary across geography, class and subculture.
The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, 2020
An examination of the smart home in urban spaces, looking at the roles of automation, command, me... more An examination of the smart home in urban spaces, looking at the roles of automation, command, mediated exteriorities and play.
Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, Feb 9, 2012
Ingrid Richardson (Eds) (2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication... more Ingrid Richardson (Eds) (2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) Raise the iPhone with its back pointing towards your subject. Tap and hold the camera button on the touch screen. Release the button. Hear the familiar shutter release sound effect, and watch the shutter animation.
The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The A... more The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog.
In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.
Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.
Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.
Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.
Convergence, Jan 1, 1997
Digitising the Beat
Police Databases and Incoporeal Transformations
Chris Chesher
Abstract
... more Digitising the Beat
Police Databases and Incoporeal Transformations
Chris Chesher
Abstract
How do databases change policing? Police work is simultaneously heavily physical and highly bound by abstraction. Police exercise coercive power with the mandate of abstractions of law, regulations and record-keeping. In making an arrest, an officer acts physically, but also in language: transforming the subject into one in a state of being under arrest. This paper specifically examines the recently implemented Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) to explore how computers affect the interplay of the abstractions of law and regulations with bodies in space.
Reflexivity and Arts Informatics
mustard.tapor.uvic.ca
CD-ROM'S Identity Crisis
Media International Australia, Jan 1, 1996
Uploads
Robotics by Chris Chesher
Digital cultures by Chris Chesher
In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.
Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.
Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.
Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.
Police Databases and Incoporeal Transformations
Chris Chesher
Abstract
How do databases change policing? Police work is simultaneously heavily physical and highly bound by abstraction. Police exercise coercive power with the mandate of abstractions of law, regulations and record-keeping. In making an arrest, an officer acts physically, but also in language: transforming the subject into one in a state of being under arrest. This paper specifically examines the recently implemented Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) to explore how computers affect the interplay of the abstractions of law and regulations with bodies in space.