Join us this Thursday, June 22nd, from 14-16 hrs (German time) for the fourth RUSTLab lecture of this summer term. Andrei Korbut will present his work on “Robotic Technoperformances: Interactional Indeterminacies in Public Appearances of Anthropomorphic Robots”.
Although anthropomorphic robots are still not a part of our everyday lives, they have ceased to be exclusively lab objects, and now the general public can interact with them at special events like TV shows, press conferences, or consumer electronics shows. These appearances of anthropomorphic robots can be called, following Mark Coeckelbergh, “technoperformances”, because they are artfully staged events centered around technology in action. The talk will consider the interactional indeterminacies that accompany such technoperformances and the ways their participants deal with these indeterminacies. Using publicly available video records of public communications with anthropomorphic robots, it will be shown that human participants face three types of interactional indeterminacies: speech exchange indeterminacies, topic indeterminacies, and format indeterminacies, and that they cope with some of these indeterminacies using situated resources, but leave others open.
Andrei Korbut has a PhD in Sociology and currently is a fellow at CAIS (Center for Advanced Internet Studies) in Bochum. His primary interests are ethnomethodological studies of human-computer interaction and user encounters with artificial intelligence technologies. He studied digitalization of labor, communication with voice interfaces, and transformation of domestic environments by smart technologies. His current research focuses on public events featuring anthropomorphic robots.
Location: on campus (Universitätsstr. 104, 2nd floor, 44799 Bochum) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Infrastructuring Indeterminacies here on our website.