Addressing political conflicts with the help of robots and puppets
The internet bears the promise of connecting individuals from opposite edges of the world in a shared cyberspace. But how can we truly connect over a virtual medium? The answer is: with Telerobots.
How would you describe the feeling when you’re about to meet a person for the first time, but your mind is already brimming with images, stereotypes, fears, and hopes — purely because that person is part of a particular group? And prejudices about that group have been circulating in the media and by word-of-mouth for as long as you can remember?
Now, all those thoughts and ideas are about to spiral downward into a human body. If I were to describe that experience in one word, it would be grounding — a resounding reminder of the gap that exists between the strangers that live in the abstract universe of our thought, and those who are flesh and blood, standing right in front of us.
I experienced this when I took part in a German peace initiative that invited a group of Israelis to meet with a group of Palestinians from across the separation barrier, the long concrete wall that separates Israel from the West Bank. The first idea that struck me upon our contact was not that the Palestinians were more friendly or frightening than I had imagined, but, simply, that they were corporeal. That every-body comes with their own unique history, in a style that is reminiscent of your own yet uniquely different.
This realization, in my view, is the foundation for mutual understanding and conflict resolution.
It’s simply not possible for millions of Israelis and Palestinians to take the same journey I did, however. Face-to-face peace initiatives are laden with bureaucracy and financial challenges, and organizers struggle to recruit diverse groups of participants. That is where communication technology comes in. The internet bears the promise of connecting individuals from opposite edges of the world in a shared cyberspace. We can enter the virtual sphere using our keyboards, our fingertips, or even our whole bodies when we wear a Virtual Reality headset. We can assume any shape or form as our avatars and surround ourselves with virtual, playful environments that facilitate either collaboration or quarrel.
But there is something about cyberspace that makes us see others differently from how we see them in the real world. Other people’s avatars do not conform to the same physical laws as ours. They are not here, but there. Even when they are fully formed 3D characters in an immersive Virtual Reality environment, to me, they still feel flat, remote, and abstract. In fact, they have more in common with the figures in my imagination than with the people I met in Germany. How, then, can we try to reproduce that grounding element over a virtual medium? My answer is robots, or Telerobots to be exact.
Remotely operated robots are increasingly being used in social situations where face-to-face meetings are difficult to organize. We see them in public service settings such as health care facilities and educational establishments as well as private sector workplaces and residential homes.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, telerobots are getting more attention; people are searching for new ways to be present at a remote location without risking their health.
In Japan, for example, one university used telerobots for its graduation ceremony. This allowed the graduating students to feel that they were part of a ritual associated with specific sites and objects such as a degree certificate and a university hall.
That is precisely the difference between what we call virtual presence and telepresence. While “virtual presence” refers to a sense of being present in a virtual environment, the prefix tele- evokes our presence in a distant location across the same physical space, whether that is the planet that we all share, the political sphere or the ground on which conflict and reconciliation happen.
For the past decade, first as a hobby and later as research at the Aalto Media Lab, I have experimented with various shapes and forms for telerobotics that have the potential to facilitate contact between strangers. I hacked toys, appropriated commercial robots that read your physical movements, and finally produced a robot from scratch. For my Master’s thesis (Peled, 2019), and with the help of two extremely talented industrial designers, Joaquin Aldunate and Anderson Sudario, I designed and built a soft telerobot made of silicone that I named HITODAMA, which is Japanese for the human spirit.
Throughout my experiments, the challenge has always been to provide an expressive platform that facilitates trust and friendship not with the robot but with the people operating it “behind the curtain”. As I’ve continued to pursue this line of research in my doctoral studies, I’ve realized that, instead of trying to make the medium disappear, I need to embrace it and turn it into a performance.
Indeed, the futuristic practice of telerobotics is not unlike the traditional art form of puppetry.
The hybrid persona that emerges between the puppeteer and the puppet resembles what we see with internet users and their avatars, but the real connecting thread between a robot and a puppet is their physical aspect; their ability to occupy a space.
Puppets have long been used as vehicles for satire and protest. One of the best examples of this is Gary Friedman’s Puppets Against Apartheid. Gary took his protest against South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s to the streets, with a funny and provocative puppet show featuring political figures such as Nelson Mandela and P.W Botha. He describes the audience’s reaction as ranging from great affection to violent dismay. Yet despite the brutal character of the regime, Gary was never arrested. But then he never broke any laws, the puppets did.
Technology may allow us to cross even more borders through puppeteering. What if the show was actually run from a different country using the internet? Robotic glove-puppets were already used in 2008 by Jwu-Sheng Hu et al. Research at the forefront of robotics and textiles such as Suguitan & Hoffman’s Blossom and Pouta & Mikkonen’s Interactive Hand Puppet has shown how we can integrate everyday textile materials with robotic actuators and sensors. All that is left to do now is to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
By combining old art forms and everyday materials with the latest advances in science and tech, and by working in public, physical spaces, we can try to create a future that reminds us that we are, in the words of Bruno Latour (2018), terrestrial. Through my research at Aalto on telerobotic intergroup contact, I intend to show that robots can also be political.
Avner Peled
Avner is a creative technologist and media artist with a background in computer science, neurobiology, and philosophy. Currently, as Doctoral Researcher at Aalto Media Lab, Avner is exploring the use of telepresence robots as mediators for intergroup contact and conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine. He is also developing 3D web visualizations of big data for the New York Times.
The research is supported by the Kone Foundation.
References
Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons.
