Face robots onscreen: Comfortable and alive

Abstract

This chapter draws upon the author’s experimental video artwork Comfortable and Alive, made with the Japanese gynoid robot Geminoid-F by ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories, to facilitate a wider, yet fractional, discussion of the cultural provenance and potential integration of specifically femaleappearing android robots (gynoids). The “display architecture” of the gynoid can be viewed as an aesthetic emulation by robot designers of the centuries-old characterization of girls and women as naïve, pretty, submissive and soothing; this construction also pervades televised and other media. At the present time it is viewed as ideal that the service gynoid should make humans feel comfortable, most often in companionship, entertainment, hostessing, and reception roles. The artwork raises poignant issues pertaining to machine translation, and human– machine affinity, in context of the replication in robots of societal gender norms.