Whimsical Bodies and Performative Machines: Aesthetics and Affects of Robotic Art
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the ways in which robots’ behaviours are designed and curated to elicit reactions from their human counterparts. Through the work of artists such as Nam June Paik, Steve Daniels, Edward Ihnatowicz and Norman White, a survey of robotic art illustrates a particular aesthetic and behavioural language that is non-threatening, animalistic, cute, quaint and whimsical. Considering the artists’ programming of behaviours and construction of aesthetics, the use of animal behavioural modelling, and developments in social robotics, this article unpacks how meaning is inscribed onto robots and in return how affect is transmitted to human viewers. By exploring the whimsical bodies, performative machines and networked nonhumans brought forth in robotic artworks, this article draws out how aesthetic and behavioural languages of robotic art play into peoples’ emotional and affective encounters with them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it