Merging art and industry, a performance art piece recently on display in London has at its center an unlikely star: an industrial robot whose former career was in automotive assembly. Conceived and directed by Aurelien Bory, the show is a meeting between man and machine, exploring the sometimes-blurry lines between the two as two human actors/acrobats interact with the powerful, massive robot arm. The robotic arm joins other artistically-inclined robots at center stage, positioned quite literally in the middle of the performance platform (it’s controlled by an operator backstage). The act portrays the back-and-forth relationship between humans and their technology; at times the humans seem to control the stage, at other times the robot is clearly in charge, picking up the human acrobats and moving them around the stage. The piece, which ran last month at the London International Mime Festival, required the stage manager to learn the old machine programming of the aging robot and a lot of debugging. The result is a robot that’s sometimes purely mechanical, and sometimes surprisingly human after all. All that’s missing is a Daft Punk cameo.
Humans doing the robot with a robot, classic.
Eavesdropper