ROBOTS CAN ALREADY VACUUM YOUR HOUSE AND DRIVE YOUR CAR. SOON, THEY WILL BE YOUR COMPANION.
~Friend for Life By Adam Piore for Popular Science (November 2014)
Or so predicts Popular Science magazine in response to a US tour of Osaka Universitys Robot-Human Theater Project. Whether you find the premise that your next best friend will come with batteries enticing or eerie or some combination thereof, the Robot-Human Theater Project has dedicated itself to making that dream/nightmare come to lifeor at least appear as if its come to lifeon a stage near you.
Just when you finally thought we were safe from a robot takeover, theyre learning how to act even more like usby acting instead of us. Dr. Ishiguro Hiroshi of android fame is at it again, only this time hes in cahoots with Seinendan Theater Company and Osaka University. Thanks to these human allies, our robot overlords (or companions as their propaganda would like us to believe) inch ever closer. Only now theyll be trying to woo us with Shakespeare.
Meet the Masterminds
Robots dont make themselves, you know (at least not yet). Thus far the aspiring robot actors journey from assembly line to curtain call has relied on the single-minded devotion of their human alliesparticularly the aforementioned Ishiguro Hiroshi along with Hirata Oriza and Kuroki Kazunari.
Ishiguro, an international authority on robotics engineering and AI who often sends the android version of himself to lecture abroad, unsurprisingly heads up the engineering end of things. Hirata, a well-known public figure in Japan and playwright/director/founder of the internationally active Seinendan Theater Company, equally unsurprisingly takes charge of all things artistic. And Kuroki, president of Osaka-based robot and computer company Eager Co. Ltd, throws lots of money and resources their way.
But why go to all this trouble in the first place? Wouldnt it be cheaper to hire a human actor rather than build one from the ground up? Despite their remarkably diverse backgrounds, engineer Ishiguro and theater artist Hirata are remarkably in sync with each other on this point: for them the Robot-Theater Project isnt just an big-budget spectacle, its a way to combine the forces of art and science in order to tackle what makes humans human and what makes a performance a performanceand theyre equally convinced that both of those boundaries are incredibly malleable.
In Ishiguros words, My goal is to understand the feeling of a presence. What is that? I want to understand what is a human, and what is a human likeness. Hes psyched to use this opportunity to come closer and closer to replicating human presence and behavior with his electro-mechanical minions. Hirata, for his part, believes that robots are a means of thinking about human beings. As far as hes concerned, robots are just another way for him to learn how to most effectively manipulate an audience. He firmly believes that a performance doesnt have to be real to have a real effect, that human emotional response is more of a mechanical reflex than anything more mystical. In other words, these two arent just looking to shock and awe their audience with shiny gadgetsthey want to break our entire conception of reality.
Robots and Androids and Humans, Oh My!
Since the Robot-Human Theater Project opened its factory doors in 2008, Hirata and Ishiguro have sent their creations on tour to 33 cities in 15 countries. Out of the six plays theyve developed thus far, both eerily lifelike androids and clearly mechanical robots have taken the stage alongside human co-actors. In order of appearance, here they are:
Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker) Debut in 2008
Its the near future, where Takeo and Momoko, two portly and blindingly yellow service bots, tend the home of the married couple they work for in this short one act play. But Yuji the human husband and Takeo the robot have both become too depressed and existential to workleaving human wife Yuji and robot Momoko to fret about their hikikomori other halves.
Mori no Oku (The Heart of the Forest) Debut in 2010
Three species collide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a team of scientists and their robot helpers are studying the local bonobo populationthe species most closely related to our own. While the scientists industriously gather data for comparison of the primates and the humans, the robots give them more help than they bargained for in this one act.
Sayonara (same title in English) Debut in 2010 (since updated in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake)
A young woman facing imminent death seeks solace from her android caregiver, Geminoid F. As the woman struggles with her mortality, the immortal android tries to comfort her as best she can with the immortal words of poets. The updated epilogue to this one act reveals that after the womans death, Geminoid F was sent to comfort the victims of irradiated Fukushima, a place where no human is willing to go.
Sannin Shimai (Three Sisters, Android Version) Debut in 2012
A Japanese sci-fi twist on the Russian realist original, this full-length play features human, android, and robot actors on a rural Japanese estate. As the unkempt manor languishes in the current economic crisis, its inhabitants are plagued by malaise and unease. They wont shut up about moving to Tokyo, but just like in the original no one ever actually gets off their ass.
Ginga Tetsudo No Yoru (Night on the Galactic Railroad) Debut in 2013
This full-length play is the latest adaptation of a Japanese novel with the same name by Miyazawa Kenji, a perennially popular fantastical and philosophical childrens book that some adults ended up obsessed with. A poverty-stricken and socially malnourished young girl boards a magical train one night and zooms through the Milky Way galaxy, only this time with a robot tour-guide in tow.
Henshin (Metamorphosis) Debut in 2014
The skeletal Android Repliee S1 plays the lead role of Gregor Samsa in this full-length play adaptation of Franz Kafkas Metamorphosis. Except this time, instead of waking up as a bug, poor Gregor wakes up as a robot. As the Japanese advertising poster puts it: Us humans exist in an absurd world where we might become bugs tomorrow. Us humans exist in an absurd world where we cant even prove that were different from androids. Strap in for an existential crisis or three, ladies and gentlemen.
While three one-acts and three full-length plays in six years might not seem like much of an accomplishment, each of these six works required a ridiculously long development process along with a ridiculously patient team to execute it. Even for Ishiguro, designing and programming robots capable of speech and movement takes a bit of time and effort. As for director/playwright Hirata, the fact that hes directing actors that cant respond to his direction, along with the fact that hes always directed his human actors as detailed and minutely as if they were robots anyway, means hours and hours of rehearsal and programming changes to get a robot to make JUST the right degree angle turn of his head at JUST the right moment. Is all that worth it? Audiences seem to think so.
Human Responses to Theatrical-Electrical Stimuli
These giant hunks of metal have proved themselves capable of both emotionally and intellectually stirring audiences. All of the Robot-Human Theater Projects performances so far have played to almost exclusively full houses and dropped jaws. And if theater critics have not always responded with outright praise, theyve at least expressed deep fascination with the phenomenon. For example:
the stage presence of [robots] raise significant questions about theatricality and empathy. Provocatively, this evening demonstrated that perhaps the qualities we typically associate with good or effective actingpresence, responsiveness, emotional availabilitymay, in fact, prove ancillary. Although the success of these pieces necessitated understated performances from the human actors and particular design choices (such as easily navigable sets and low lighting) to establish the commonality between person and machine, these [robots] excited sympathy to an equivalent, or perhaps even greater, degree than their human counterparts. Their effectiveness in performance suggests that mimetic engagement on the part of the audience may owe less to actorly skill than to our collective instinct to attribute human feelingeven to decidedly nonhuman performers. Whether these two short plays confused the boundaries between human and robot or explicitly marked them, both pieces relied upon the audiences capacity to create empathic bonds with lifeless objects engaging dialogue between the human actors and their machine counterparts simultaneously both emphasized the differences between person and automaton and blurred those categories. (From review of Seinendan Theater Company + Osaka University Robot Theater Project by Alexis Soloski)
On the emotional end of things, many an audience member has admitted to empathizing with the robots as much if not more so than with the human actorseven to the point of shedding tears. One reviewer notes, even as I grieved for the young woman, I also felt myself worrying that the android would feel lonely once she died. Hiratas unemotional explanation for the audiences emotional outpourings is that audiences brains make up half of a performances reality. In other words, we see what we want to see.
Then theres the inevitable intellectual migraine that comes from witnessing seemingly autonomous three-dimensional beings participate in an activity once exclusively reserved for humans. Feeling empathy apparently isnt limited to feeling empathy for living things. And a performer apparently doesnt have to be emotionally alive or even alive at all to deliver a convincing performance. Hirata has said, In the case of the android(s), there are audience members who did not realize until close to the end of the play which was the robot and which (was) the human actor. Where does the human begin and the robot end? Where does the robot begin and the human end? What is a human? What is a performance? Wheres my mommy?
And then once youre through crying and philosophizing, theres still the future to consider. A future where our lives more closely resemble these plays than the lives were living right now. A future thats already being pioneered in Japan with the introduction and integration of robots that can cater to not only our practical, but our social, needs. Look no further than Paro, the fluffy robotic seal that has taken up residence in many nursing homes, or Pepper, the customer service automaton now employed by Softbank to converse with their customers. So in a sense, the Robot-Human Theater Project is depicting the logical continuation of our current society, encouraging us to imagine what roles robots can fill, what roles we want them to fill. How will humans and robots co-exist? Will they be our servants and our customer service representatives? Our friends and our lovers? And if so, is that really a bad thing? Film has given us plenty of CGI robot creations, but nothing is quite as convincing as the real thing IRLwith live 3-D actors, live 3-D audiences, and seemingly live 3-D robots in the same room at the same time.
The Future of Robot Theater
Regardless of the pace at which robotic technology is developed and integrated into our lives, the folks at the Robot-Human Theater Project show no signs of slowing down. Could it be possible that other robot theater companies will soon join them? After all, programming the robot actors might be a giant pain in the fuse box, but once its done you can rest assured that theyll never forget their lines. As Hirata has mused, Will actors at auditions soon by vying for their roles with robots? And are we entering an era in which robot actors will one day take the leads in Romeo and Juliet? How long is it before robots become better at being people than we are?
Bonus Wallpapers!
[Desktop 5120×2880 / 1280×720] ?[Mobile]
Sources
The post Japans Robot Theater and the Rise of the Android Actor appeared first on Tofugu.