Four Paths to the Future: III. Robotics

In September 2013, I went to the Palais de Tokyo to watch a robot dance. British artist Conrad Shawcross had installed a sixteen-and-a-half foot-tall former tack-welding robot in the basement of the Parisian art institute and re-programmed its once-lumpen gestures into an artful choreography of  arcs and swoops, pairing the movements with specially commissioned music by the likes of Holly Herndon, Beatrice Dillon, Mira Calix and others. “I think,” Shawcross told me, “If the company who originally built it saw this robot they would be pretty horrified.” For the spectators at the Palais de Tokyo that day, however, it was hard to deny the thing a certain grace.

For Holly Herndon, who I was able to ask about her experience working on the music a little while later, the robot’s movements were almost too smooth. She had insisted on programming in a few more “glitches” into the gestures before she could compose for it. Was the problem that the robot’s dance moves were all too human?

Conrad Shawcross – The Ada Project

Mira Calix's If The While For performed live with Conrad Shawcross' robot at the launch of The Ada Project show.

The arts of music and robotics have long eyed each other with mutual fascination. Two centuries before Kraftwerk’s frank admission "We Are The Robots," the clockmakers’ workshops of Enlightenment Europe were awash with musical automata. The first androids were human-like figures with moving parts powered by cogs and spools – like Jacques Vaucanson’s flute player, presented before the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1738, or the clockwork female figure built by the Swiss father and son, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet Droz, which played its own tiny harpsichord with fully articulated fingers.

Jacques Vaucanson’s flute player was a life-sized figure of a man that could perform twelve songs.

Three famous automatons built by Jacques de Vaucanson in the 18th century: the flute player, the duck and the tambourine player.

(Wikimedia Commons)

In recent years, this fascination has manifested itself in the Archandroid project of Janelle Monae, the "fembot" stylings of Swedish pop singer Robyn, and Beyonce’s Metropolis-esque Sasha Fierce persona. Much as Kraftwerk used their robot drag to simultaneously poke fun at clichés of Teutonic severity and nod to the industrial heritage of their hometown of Düsseldorf; the gynoids of the 21st century both satirize the submissiveness of Stepford Wives while asserting a strong, new feminine identity in the previously male-dominated tradition of Afrofuturism.

Meanwhile, Toyota has been showing off its trumpet and violin-playing "partner robots" since the 2005 Shang Hai EXPO. They’re a little less clunky and mechanical than their 18th-century forebears — but not much. Better are more recent efforts from Georgia Institute of Technology, like Haile, a robot percussionist, and Shimon, a marimba player that can even write its own tunes.

Haile, the interactive robot drummer, listens and responds to a human drummer.

Shimon, an interactive marimba-playing robot, collaborates with live musicians.

For New Zealand-based robot band, The Trons (designed by musician Greg Locke), the jerkiness is kind of part of the fun. But more recently YuMi, a Swiss robot that conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra in Pisa just this summer, has been praised by conductor Andrea Colombini for its “fluidity of gesture” and “incredible softness of touch.” Still, YuMi’s developers admit that the machine is only capable of following a set of preprogrammed instructions — it can’t respond to the nuance of instrumentalists’ playing and gets flummoxed by sudden changes of tempo. As French essayist Hervé Juvin found, in his 2010 book The Coming of the Body, the most surprising discovery of the 21st century may be that “the body is rarer — more difficult to reproduce, extend or deputize for — than the mind.”

The Trons: A self-playing robot band.

ABB's robot YuMi takes center stage in Pisa, and conducts Andrea Bocelli and Lucca Symphony Orchestra.