AASS Seminar - ROBOT DRAMA - From non-verbal interaction to conversation

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Zaven Paré, Centre for Unframed Thinking (CUT) / Rennes School of Business (RSB), Independent artist.

Remote attendance: https://oru-se.zoom.us/j/65096623293

Abstract

A very long time ago, long before AIs took care of managing our daily lives:

"My work consists in creating robot's narratives, by inserting laboratory experiments into drama situations. This use of simulations helps understanding the potentialities of different relations between humans and technological devices or artificial creatures. Beyond the character effect, the reality effect or the presence effect, in order to provoke sympathy, and above all to arouse empathy, the interlocutors must be intelligent. I have tried to suggest it by inventing behaviors specific to robots, thanks to movements and sounds usually produced unconsciously by humans. With the simulation of micromovements and the production of robots' involuntary sounds, besides the reinforcement of their presence effect, their interlocutors are able to give them a potential state of emotional consciousness."

But, why is such research still relevant in the context of implementing new AIs in social robots?

Speaker's bio

Zaven Paré works as a researcher in addition to his artistic career. He is doing Machine Art and he is a Robot Drama Researcher. He invented the electronic marionette (Ballard Institute's collections in Connecticut, also at the Musées Gadagne in Lyon, Musée d'Ethnographie in Neuchâtel and Marionettes Museums in Belgium, Italy and Russia), his devices staged the first Valère Novarina's play in English in 1999 (CalArts, Henson Festival, La Mama e.t.c., Avignon Festival). He was a costume and a set designer for dance choreographers (Marie Chouinard, Edouard Lock), for theatre and musical theatre (Denis Marleau, Mauricio Kagel) and for ballet and opera (Het National Ballet, Opera Paris-Bastille). In 2009, he became a collaborator of the Robot Actors Project of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. in the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. Some of his honors include French American Fund for Performing Arts Laureate at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), Villa Kujoyama Laureate, the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) laureate and guest of honor of the last Moscow Puppet Festival. He is the author of L'âge d'or de la robotique Japonaise (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2016), and more recently Le spectacle anthropomorphique, Entre les singes et les robots (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2021). The documentary Ganesh Yourself (ARTE, 2016), features one of his robots for an anthropological experiment during the Ganesh Festival in Mumbai.