Dancing with the Nonhuman

Abstract

This essay explores alternative notions of thinking to reimagine the nonhuman and, with it, our relationship with machines.

This is the final draft of a chapter published in: J. Bennett and M. Zournazi (eds) Thinking in the world. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Full text

Final draft. To appear in: J. Bennett and M. Zournazi (eds) Thinking in the
world. London: Bloomsbury Academic (in press, 2019).
__
Dancing with the Nonhuman
Petra Gemeinboeck
This essay explores alternative notions of thinking to reimagine the nonhuman and,
with it, our relationship with machines. Thinking is an act of shaping the world—so
much so that we tend to forget that it is not separate from us. It could be argued that in
traditional Western thought, thinking is akin to forging the world, which always is
external but fully knowable. But what if instead, thinking is a delicate, mutual
reconfiguring with the world, which we can only ever partially know? The distinction
between the two viewpoints implies a radically different subject position: the first
places the human at the ‘top of the world’, from where it is constructed and
controlled, while the latter places us inside the world, amidst its unfolding mess of
relations and in constant, even if only partial, connection to it. Andrew Pickering
states that “[i]f the world is knowable, command and control follow”
1
. Interestingly, a
world that is knowable can be known entirely without a body as it can be ‘thought
up’, fabricated according to one’s believes and assumptions. Attempting to ‘grasp’ a
world that is continuously being reconfigured and continually ‘still to know’,
however, requires active, bodily engagement. Thinking here is not about moulding
and controlling the world but a more humble, entangled pursuit, more akin to
negotiating whilst being transformed in the process; a thinking with the world, always
situated, relational, and materially anchored.
Bodily engagement with a messy, unknowable world sets the tone for my inquiry into
an arena, which, traditionally, has been blind to this entanglement. Built on a strong
Cartesian foundation, beliefs in an inherent and fixed difference between subject and
object and a “Cartesian separation of intelligibility and materiality”
2
still shape the
sociomaterial practices of artificial intelligence and robotics and, with it, visions of
our technologically enhanced future. The Director of University of Zurich’s Artificial
Intelligence Lab, Rolf Pfeifer, really says it all: “[o]nce you are caught up in this
Cartesian worldview that thinking is algorithms or a computer programme, it is
enormously difficult to free yourself from that. It just seems so obvious: there is input,
processing, output—how else could it be?”
3
. Yet it seems that there’s more at stake
than ever, as we might face a near future with autonomous battlefield robots
4
and
already encounter mechanical assistants, carers and companions—smart, friendly,
gendered, and supposedly able to understand a person’s feelings
5
.
This essay aims to intervene into the practices of situated- and social robotics and
their material concerns with embodiment, situatedness and interaction by exploring
how feminist posthuman perspectives and dancers’ bodily ways of thinking can offer
an alternative pathway to imagining and materially enacting human-machine-
environment configurations. Thinking as a material enactment not only bounds the
ways we conceive these configurations, but, as we will see, also opens up alternative,
nonhuman ways of ‘bodily thinking’ and intelligibility. First I discuss some of the
dominant practices in situated- and social robotics and the humanist views they
manifest, in tandem with feminist counterviews. This follows a material account of,

what I hope to be, a more radical posthumanist approach to robotic design. Machine
Movement Labs is a research project, which I’m leading, spanning experimental art,
performance and engineering to explore the relational and performative potential of
movement.
Situatedness by proxy
Situated- and social robotics communities do not often mingle, although they both
share situated, embodied interactions as one of their core engineering challenges. In a
nutshell, situated robotics “deals with embodied machines in complex, challenging,
often dynamically changing environments”
6
, whereas social robotics is concerned
with situating embodied machines in complex (human) social environments. Hence,
‘social robots’ engage in social interactions
7
, while for ‘situated robots’, the
environment is commonly considered only in physical terms, devoid of the social.
The foundations for situated robotics were laid in the late 80s, when a movement in
artificial intelligence (AI), often referred to as ‘New AI’, “rediscovered the body and
the environment as major causal forces in the shaping of intelligent behavior”
8
. Motor
control and “smooth real-time behaviour”
9
, it was argued, could be achieved by
exploiting the physical properties of materials and embodied interactions with the
world. Previous complex and unreliable ‘symbolic’ models of the world were
replaced by notions of embodied agency, situating the agent in the environment, and
emergent behaviours
10
. AI had finally rediscovered the body, after it had forgotten
about its predecessor, cybernetics and its open-ended embodied engagements situated
within the material world
11
, 30 years earlier. Unlike in cybernetics, however, New AI’s
material world is bereft of the social.
The term ‘situated’ in AI and robotics is “usually intended to mean that [a robot’s]
behavior and cognitive processes first and foremost are the outcome of a close
coupling between agent and environment”
12
. Yet the world brought forth in the robot’s
history of structural coupling
13
is a very limited and conveniently pragmatic one, and
‘interacting’ with the environment, in Lucy Suchman’s words, “comprise[s] variations
of conditioned response, however tightly coupled the mechanisms or emergent the
effects”
14
. Also, the nature of this coupling rarely acknowledges the involvement of
the human designer, which seems absurd, given that the robot is designed by a human
and trained to adapt to an environment to solve a task, both of which are specified by
the designer, and success or failure are defined by and only matter to the human
designer
15
. Conceptions of embodied cognition in these material enactments are
equally pragmatic and lay open the designers’ computationalist/functionalist views
16
.
The body of the robot is “typically viewed as some kind of input and output device
that provides physical grounding to the internal computational mechanisms”, reducing
it to a physical container “that allows the computational mind to interact with its
environment through sensors and actuators”
17
. Seen through my critical lens, we are
thus presented with artificial agents, which are granted their own agency, adaptable
thanks to an independent computational mind that feeds from and acts through a body
container, coupled to the environment yet without co-constituting each other, and not
a human designer in sight. !
My lens is shaped by Lucy Suchman’s radical reworkings of human-machine
configurations
18
and Karen Barad’s concept of ‘agential realism’
19
. The latter offers a
posthumanist understanding of how the world, subjects and objects are reconfigured

in our material-discursive practices, such as robotics, and how these continuous
‘agential intra-actions’ enact specific boundaries and meanings. Agency, in this
performative understanding, is not a property, someone or something can have or be
granted with, but rather “agency is a matter of intra-acting … an enactment”
20
. What
makes this philosophical account so appealing is that the world is no longer fixed,
waiting for us to ‘be known’. Any fixed relations, boundaries and meanings are our
doings and result from our reconfigurings of the world, which makes us and our
sociomaterial practices accountable. Particularly relevant for this discussion is that
subject object difference also is a matter of intra-action, “aris[ing] from the material-
discursive practices through which boundaries and associated entities are made”
21
.
This is not to say that it is a world potentially without differences, but rather that
boundaries and related entities are not given, they are produced and continuously
reaffirmed, reproduced.
Robotics through the looking glass
Social robotics as a material-discursive practice is, one could argue, all about
reconfiguring subject–object boundaries. In contrast to situated robotics, social
robotics places and explores robots within a social environment, however, they are
not situated by means of structural coupling, as their social capacities, most
commonly, are neither dynamically produced nor continually conditioned by their
social environment. In social robotics, the robot is still considered an electro-
mechanical artefact, rather than a sociomaterial phenomenon, hence the robot needs to
be implanted with the ‘social’, like embellishing an alien other with etiquette. The still
young field is currently preoccupied, it seems, with robots’ social acceptability, and
thus focuses on questions of appearance and social behavior as it is perceived and
accepted, rather than exploring how a robot becomes a social entity in its intra-actions
and reconfigurings of the social environment. Most research has directed its attention
to “the application of ‘benign’ social behavior. Thus, social robots are usually
designed as assistants, companions, or pets, in addition to the more traditional role of
servants”
22
. As robots are assigned their social role—roles that already exist in our
society—and are made to fit them, it is crucial that we recognise the active production
of boundaries as part of this material practice. Particularly, since the objective of
‘fitting’ these roles and for people to accept them in these roles, seemingly justifies
the assumption that humanlike or humanoid physical features is the best approach
23
.
And, having enacted robots as companions and servants in our own image, “dominant
discourses in robotics are quick to grant subjecthood to the humanoid machine”, and,
with it, “to embrace the erasure of human/machine difference”
24
. Robots mimicking
humans or pets, often in cute, caricatured ways, deliberately blur the difference
between organic and mechanical bodies, as well as human and machine cognition, to
elicit human investment based on superficial, and often fake, social cues. Suchman
argues that, “the figure of the humanoid robot sits provocatively on the boundary of
subjects and objects, threatening its breakdown at the same time that it reiterates its
founding identities and differences
25
”. In practice, it needs to be said, the current
limitations of robotics technology and artificial intelligence quickly cause this façade
to crumble and break, and interacting with these humanlike machines often is
frustrating and disappointing
26
. But this only buys us time; it doesn’t seem to weaken
the foundations of the humanist assumptions this charade is built on. It is as if we
were looking for a robotic counterpart, to look into a mirror: a mirror, which is
predictable, programmable and replaceable.

What we see in current robotics, particularly in social robotics, which has in recent
years attracted the majority of funding in robotics, is the jarring paradox of a quest for
increasing (social) intelligence and autonomy, while clinging to our human high
ground that separates us from our machines and ‘safely’ putting them into their place
of servitude
27
. It is the conservative politics of the upstairs–downstairs scenario,
whereas we’re pouring millions into the ‘education’ of downstairs to become a more
productive workforce (here, the ‘sociable’ robot only reflects the expansion from
industrial production into social services; it is not to join the upstairs). In this
paradoxical, humanist narrative, we seek to inscribe into robots the superior position
of cognitive entities—making them in our image—to serve us and fulfil our wishes so
that we can more effectively maintain and expand our superior position in the world.
It is an age-old narrative, of course, that now promises to have a ubiquitous material
effect. Ironically, this humanist view also requires engineers and collaborating
psychologists to define ‘what human is’
28
, so that the machine can recognise these
‘parameters’ in humans and/or re-perform them. This, for instance, leads to
grotesquely simplified models of human emotion, suitable to be translated into rules
and algorithms. Non-humanlike machines, on the other hand, are usually seen as
‘functional’
29
and rarely graced with social behaviours or (apparently) human-level
intelligence. Intelligence, in particular social intelligence or intelligent machines
embedded in our social milieu, seems to be inseparately linked to humanlike
appearance.
Perhaps, what we currently see in social robotics is a phenomenon similar to the one
in early AI, driven by overly ambitious, unachievable goals based on arrogant,
humanist assumptions. Referred to as the ‘top down’ approach, it was thought that
artificial intelligence could be ‘solved’ through symbolic representations, including
the explicit formalisation of “human common-sense knowledge”
30
, that is, “the
millions of abstractions, models, facts, rules of thumb, representations, etc., that we
all possess and that we assume everyone else does”
31
. Needless to say that this goal
was bound to fail, but imagine it hadn’t. Looking at the current development of
androids in Japan and how they manifest our humanist desires for replicating human
life and common-sense assumptions about sex and gender roles
32
, it seems that the
ultimate goal for social robotics is to literally embody the vision of a perfect(able)
human. One can’t help seeing the parallel to early AI’s presumptuous desires to
replicate human intelligence. The assumptions and desires that allow for human
intelligence to be equated to a disembodied algorithm are the very same that allow for
the human to be reenacted as a humanoid mechanism.
Dancing with the nonhuman: Machine Movement Lab
We can also find critical voices within the robotics field, questioning the focused
attention on the reproduction of human bodies and behaviours. Rolf Pfeifer and Josh
Bongard argue that “[w]e have to develop an understanding of the robot’s own
embodiment because it is this embodiment that will ultimately determine the
grounding and thus the level of understanding and communication that is possible
between humans and robots”
33
. The following introduces the research project Machine
Movement Lab
34
, which I am currently leading and which aims to develop an
understanding of the robot’s own embodiment, albeit not only to ground itself but also
to explore human-machine configurations that can offer, in Suchman’s words, “more
radical reworkings of the figures of both”
35
. Rather than turning machines into ‘social
actors’, this material practice challenges the dominant assumptions of subject object

difference, and develops a relational, performative approach that investigates how
human and machine co-constitute each other by materially exploring the “folding of
humans and nonhumans”
36
. As we will see, movement generates the trajectory along
which this folding occurs. In a nutshell, the project’s enactive approach harnesses
dancers’ movement expertise to design the robot’s non-anthropomorphic body, its
potential to move and capacity to learn. Collaborating with (human) choreographers
and dancers, our aim is not to render the robot more humanoid by but rather to
investigate the micro-ecologies of a robot becoming entangled with other bodies and
the world. That is, how sociomaterial relations and dynamics get produced and
activated, and, furthermore, how alternative, posthumanist notions of intelligence are
spawned from these, always material, interdependencies. The project puts forward the
proposition that movement and its connection-making, knowledge-generating
potential is key to both, the ‘bodying’
37
of a machine and its capacity to ‘intra-act’
38
with other bodies and the world. This becoming of agency promises to be the more
transformative the more we recognise and embrace the difference of machinic
embodiment and cognition. Here is where movement’s capacity of bodying, worlding
and eliciting responses can be exploited to bring about interesting relations without
relying on human likeness or the familiarity of pets. Let me unfold this idea in more
detail.
!
Thinking With the Body
Leach and deLahunta have argued that “[m]ovement, ‘thinking with the body’, is a
way of exploring the world
39
”. Movement is the core medium of contemporary dance,
where it is “deliberately and systematically cultivated for its own sake”
40
. To explore
the potential of movement to relate beyond the human, we collaborate with the De
Quincey Company and its artistic director and choreographer Tess de Quincey.
Training in BodyWeather, founded on Butoh dance and drawing from both eastern
and western dance, martial arts and theatre practice, De Quincey Co’s practice is
already well attuned to our relational, performative approach. BodyWeather
practitioners are extremely skilled in tuning into “the how of the movement as it is
being embodied moment by moment”
41
. To shift the body out of its known, habitual
pathways
42
, the dancers often respond to imagery while skilfully attending to the
becoming of movement and how it transforms their bodies. Using images, i.e. of
external forces like wind or a pressure cooker, for the body to work from, allows them
to escape the habitual and ‘find’ new movements to bodily explore the imagined
forces, tensions and connections, evoked by these images; and the forces and
trajectories produced by their movements, in turn, reconfigure their body.
According to deLahunta et al, this bodily sensibility allows “the movement to become
‘thought-filled’, itself the instrument of cognition”
44
. Perhaps more than ‘thought-
filled’, this continuous becoming of movement actively propels and gives form to
thought in the making. In many ways, the bodily relations continuously made and
unmade by the dancers lay open the embeddedness and situatedness of cognition.
Albeit here the world doesn’t only provide Andy Clark’s external scaffoldings
45
that
extend the dancers’ cognition, but rather co-constitutes, co-shapes the body and its
unfolding movement. Because the BodyWeather practice always positions and
experiences the body in relation to space, other bodies and things, Barad’s notion of
intra-action
46
deeply aligns with the dancers’ co-emerging with the world, moment by
moment. In this sense, their bodily thinking also evokes the ecological approach of
distributed cognition
47
, however not, as it is often understood in robotics, in the form

of a collective of networked, separate agents, but rather as an entanglement; a
thinking with the world. Hence, the moving body in space generates new knowledge
by actively creating new connections and reconfiguring the world. Doing so requires
rejecting our habitual pathways, being in the present, and actively engaging with
forces within and (apparently) outside; a re-recognition of bodies and things beyond
what they have already been labelled with.
Neither situated robotics nor social robotics currently explore the potential of
relational, kinesthetic intelligence and how it could expand our human-machine
configurations. Situated robotics aims for artificial, embodied agents, which exhibit
intelligent behaviour compared to living ‘role models’, while social robotics is
invested in developing sociable agents, which people perceive as intelligent. In both
cases, judgment of the agent’s intelligence is actively located in the human observer,
who is placed outside, separated from this entanglement. Yet in favouring the human
viewpoint, separated from the world and ‘equipped’ with its own autonomous agency,
we are starting with a problematic set of epistemological and ontological
assumptions
48
. More than simply reaffirming these assumptions, they reproduce a
“humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate
things”
49
, and, with it, a functionalist stance to understanding intelligence. In contrast,
movement and bodily thinking makes itself part of the world, promoting a
posthumanist worldview in the sense that they shift the focus from representation to
performativity and open up notions of the body as always being entangled with other
bodies, things and the world. Laying open the co-constitution of bodies and
phenomena, they also destabilise the differential boundaries between human and
nonhuman bodies and their intelligence, without simply equating the two. Notions of
bodily intelligence can thus open up a ‘third’ path for our interactions with machines,
one that doesn’t reconstruct or mimic existing posthumanist desires of human likeness
and humanlike models of intelligence. Rather, such a relational approach suggests
that we can open up mutual intelligibilities between humans and machines by
exploring what gets activated and emerges “through and as part of their entangled
intra-relating”
50
. Robots are then no longer positioned outside the social and it is no
longer necessary to ‘imbue’ them with artificial social attributes. Movement and how
it makes itself part the world thus opens up a productive path to better understanding
subject object entanglement and to explore notions of sociality, agency and
intelligibility beyond their human conceptions.
It is messy
Before I continue, it is worth noting that the relational approach discussed here is a
practice still in the making and seeks to open up and to explore questions rather than
presenting a solution (if there is such a thing). Entanglements of bodies are messy and
our material practice, without doubt, continuously defines and produces boundaries
51
.
The challenge is to give into this continuous becoming, and I would like to say here
‘without assuming control’, however this would not accurately reflect how our
material practice evolves in the lab, ‘on the ground’ as it were. There are many
moments, in which we feel that we need to ‘make a decision’, excluding ideas,
materials and potential relations in favour of others, where we actively channel a path
forward as we feel the pressure to move the project along. An important part of this
material practice then is to acknowledge these lines drawn, but also to record a large
amount of context, conversations, and seemingly small details to, in a way, capture (at
least a slice of) the sociomaterial environment that they emerged from. This allows us

to reflect on the relations that we had previously carved out against a set of excluded
potential relations, and for the evolving practice and its ‘measurable’ results to not get
cut off from the complex, productive mess, which they brought about and emanated
from. This is what Donna Haraway has talked about as the “world of immeasurable
results”
52
, which, unsurprisingly, is where all the relations happen.
There is one particular exclusion in our project, however, that is very deliberate:
attributes of (organic) lifelikeness. Counter to most current assumptions in robotics,
we are exploring how far we can push the relationship between abstract, simple
machine morphologies and their potential to become a body by moving in relational,
performative ways. Rather than attributing the quality of relationality and, with it, the
capacity for eliciting responses to the body
53
, we look to the relational potential of
movement to generate meaning and intelligibly. This performative understanding
undermines dominant humanist-representationalist assumptions in robotics, and opens
up interesting configurations with abstract, non-anthropomorphic machines.
When a ‘thing’ becomes a body
How then can bodily thinking be harnessed to develop a relational, performative
approach to assist with the bodying of a robot and its ways of learning to move and
interact with the world? Our material exploration revolves around the development of
a new method, called Performative Body Mapping (PBM), which,currently comprises
four stages: bodying, grounding, imitation, and improvisation. Future stages will also
include a performative approach to learning and improvising in social situations
beyond the sociomaterial environment of the lab. In the following, I will take a closer
look at the first stage, bodying, then briefly outline our relational machine learning
approach, and, finally, cycle back to movement’s relational potential to discuss how
our performative approach draws on the social phenomenon already built-into the
encounter.
The first stage of PBM involves a machine ‘costume’ to be inhabited and activated by
a (BodyWeather) dancer. Costume here refers to a wearable object, standing in for a
potential machine body, that is, the machine to be bodied. The shape of the costume is
not fixed but changes—evolves, if you will—in response to what kind of movements
and bodily relations the dancer can activate. Once we find a costume shape that, when
activated, allows for interesting ‘bodying’, motion captures of the activated costume
inform the design of a mechanical prototype. From a technical viewpoint, the costume
is a full-size, non-mechanical prototype of a robot design in process. Yet, involving
the sensibilities and bodily imagination of a choreographer and a dancer, it becomes
an instrument for mapping between two different body morphologies, and for the
dancer to embody and skilfully tune into this strange object to explore how it ‘bodies’
in movement. The dancer’s movements, in turn, are co-shaped by the material forces
and affordances of the machine costume, so that their distinct direction, speed, and
rhythm
54
, emerge from the entanglement of the two. The use of costumes to literally
co-shape performers’ movements is not new. For his 1993 production of Tristan and
Isolde, Heiner Mueller asked Yohji Yamamoto to design costumes for the singers
“that would impede on the movement they are used to”
55
. Rather than impeding the
dancer’s movement, however, we are looking for a productive intermeshing.
BodyWeather practitioners, trained to bodily explore the ‘beyond human’, are well
attuned to the challenging task of bodily thinking with the costumes. As Tess de

Quincey put it, “the whole point about BodyWeather is to go beyond the
biomechanics through images, [that is] we recruit the biomechanics to find ways to
move, which are not normally positioned as human movements”
56
.
Let me take a closer look at the process of bodily negotiating between these two, the
dancer’s body and the materiality of the costume, and the emerging transformation.
It’s the process of the ‘thing’ becoming an interesting, affective body as it moves,
relates, and takes on a presence of its own. In other words, movement produces and
propels the becoming-body (bodying) of the machine costume. We found that the
costume becomes a body as soon as the dancer enters it and begins exploring how she
can respond!to!its material tensions and forces and!‘find’!movements!with%them.
Our task, then, was to find material properties for the making of interesting bodyings,
which, to us, are bodies whose becoming does not rely on human- or lifelike qualities
but emerge from the entanglement and the movements and relations it produces. In
practice, finding this ‘interesting bodying’ occurred in approximation, step by step. At
the start, we asked the dancers to inhabit a wide range of materials, shapes and
objects, only to narrow the scope of possible paths and filter out those whose resulting
body, when activated, relied too much on the dancer’s own morphology. We favoured
simple, abstract shapes, similar to a blank canvas, without a front or back, head or
face, or limb-like structures, to heighten the bodying ability of movement and elude
the distractions of physical appearance, tempting us to make analogies to known or
living ‘things’.
Rather than moving the costume, dancers learned to move with the strange
morphology, and the inherent material tensions and forces it afforded. Sometimes the
dancers would improvise, however most of the negotiations emerged from the
dialogue between choreographer and dancer, extending the material entanglement and
process of bodying beyond the physical confines of the costume. In these
negotiations, the choreographer developed her ideas based on an external perspective
onto the costume-becoming-body and the dancer responded from within and the
material experience, which only she had access to. The choreographer would
articulate an image or find a word “that bridge[s] the distance between the
intellectually understood and the range of feelings”
57
elicited. In one session, for
instance, Tess de Quincey asked the dancer, inhabiting a plain cardboard box, to
express a question mark. When the dancer responded to the prompt, we witnessed the
box performing a shape, seemingly positing layers of hesitation, inquiry and alertness
along its movement trajectory. To be precise, rather than a positing, we experienced
the finding of a movement, starting off with a hesitating twist that accelerated
upwards, with a slight inclination, before it came to a sudden halt. This was not a
visual representation of a question mark, but rather the bodily processing of what a
question mark does. Indeed, the box-becoming-body emerged from the “movement
subtleties and qualities, contrasts between tension and relaxation, and between high
degrees of physicality and absolute stillness”
58
.
Once we found an ‘interesting bodying’, the activated costume is recorded using
motion capture, which in the next project stage informs the design of a mechanical
prototype that resembles the costume and its capacities to move as closely as possible.
This is the stage, where the dancer’s bodily thinking becomes a movement
‘apparatus’, that is, where the movement emerging from this entanglement becomes
the diagram for the robotic mechanism and, with it, its ability to learn to move based

on its machinic relations with the world. It is also where we focus on the machine’s
own embodiment and its grounding
59
, and bodily potential to learn and relate. While
this robot-making stage clearly introduces new boundaries and material
entanglements, we must take great care to not undo the productive effects of the
human-nonhuman entanglement that produced the body in the first place.
Towards machinic bodily intelligence
Although the robot’s mechanical design is shaped by the costume’s movements,
resulting from a human-nonhuman enmeshment, recognising and tapping into the
difference of the machine’s embodiment and how it can relate to the world, is at the
very core of our project. Our performative, relational approach thus also materialises
in the methods we adopt and adapt for the robot’s machine learning. Our aim is for
the robot’s movements to continue to ‘body’ its otherwise abstract, simple
morphology (the last costume we worked with is of a box-like shape, extended with
flexible concertinaed openings). That is to say, the moving object becomes a body as
it assumes a presence, senses and relates to the environment and its affordances, and
elicits responses from other bodies. Doing so, our aim is not for the body to reproduce
behaviours from living organisms, which significantly differs from common situated
robotics approaches. Our motivation is to experiment with new, nonorganic forms of
embodied couplings (producing and produced by movement) and, with it, to move
into a nonorganic realm of body-environment couplings. We are thus not interested in
giving lifelike characteristics to the robot
60
, although people may project them, but
rather seek to explore the micro-ecologies of a robot body becoming entangled, and
how its movements produce and activate relations and sensations. Eluding subject
object binaries, this machine-becoming-body takes on a position in the middle, neither
subject nor object.
Movement shapes the way the robot perceives, learns about and relates to its world,
producing material, mutual relationships with other bodies and the environment as a
form of machinic bodily intelligence. This potential to relate is further mobilised and
enhanced by the robot’s ability to learn and adapt. Rather than looking at the robot’s
body as a mobile container, a relational approach to machine learning is developed in
tandem with the robot’s embodiment and capacity to move, that is, its potential to
relate to and reconfigure its environment. To explore this interdependency in more
detail, the following briefly outlines the first three relational machine learning phases,
grounding, imitation and improvisation. Later learning phases will engage
choreographers and dancers to develop performance scenarios for the machine to
learn and improvise in more complex sociomaterial environments beyond the lab.
In the grounding phase, the robot learns how it can move in relation to its
environment through trial-and-error to ground its movements and relations and any
future learning in its own specific embodiment. In both situated- and social robotics,
mind (control system) and (robot) body are still considered separate, that is, the
artificial nervous system operates “largely independent of the body it is carried out
in”
61
. Both, intelligence and intelligibility are decoupled from the body ‘substrate’,
which also lays the ground for human intelligence to be transferable into a machinic
body and a machinic body being intelligible if it ‘carries’ human-like intelligence.
Our approach, in contrast, develops the robot’s intrinsically machinic intelligence and
potential to be intelligible from its unique bodily capacity to move. It deploys the
developmental robotics
62
method of ‘motor babbling’
63
, which allows for the robot to

‘discover’ its own body and possible kinesthetic relations in response to
environmental affordances. Through this active self-exploration, the robot gradually
generates a body map, which is unique to its own material body and intricately
couples it with the control system, developed in response to the body’s capacity to
move. In the imitation phase, the robot learns to imitate the movements of its dancer-
activated costume twin, as closely as its own body map allows. This is the phase, in
which the bodying of the robot and its ability to relate through movement come full
circle. Learning by imitation is a popular social learning method in Social Robotics
64
,
whereas commonly robots learn to imitate human movements, limited to narrowly
defined tasks. Given the enormous difference between human and machinic
embodiments, regardless of how humanlike the machine appears, the translation
between the two usually proves quite difficult. Perhaps more even problematic,
however, this required translation between human and machinic bodies fuels the
desire for robots to look and behave similarly to humans
65
. In contrast, motion
captures of our dancer-activated robot costume allow the robot to learn from its own
mirror image. As it learns to imitate the costume’s movements, the goal is for the
robot to learn the constraints that produce the movement qualities and subtleties,
which emerged from the dancer-costume enmeshment. Hence, rather than only
knowing a specific set of movements, the robot gradually learns patterns of
movement, that is, “the systematic way patterns are structured, sequenced, and related
to one another”
66
, based on its own machinic body sense (see grounding). The final
phase is improvisation, where the robot learns to adapt its previously learned patterns
of movement to invent new movements, in dialogue with the choreographer. Drawing
on methods from computational creativity
67
, the machine learns to play with the
movement material given to develop movements that are unique to its own machinic
body and its relations to the environment.
A new playground
Bodily intelligence and the moving body’s potential to sense, relate to, reconfigure
and tune into other bodies not only inform our enactive design approach but also
constitute the common ground from which mutual relations between humans and
machines can unfold. “We literally discover ourselves in movement”
68
, and we make
sense of the world and other bodies based on our kinesthetic understanding and
sensibilities. Bodies in movement, human and nonhuman, thus elicit responses in
other bodies. Leach and deLahunta describe the affective reach of movement as “an
extension of feeling, knowing, and sensing into the world with, and of, other bodies”
69
.
Knowing here is about the ongoing active, bodily engagement, “a matter of
intra-acting”
70
, which I touched upon at the very beginning of this article.
Thinking and knowing as an ongoing reach into and with the world, a
movement that is always becoming and never fully complete, are melding
together. Movement and how it bodies a ‘thing’ is thus, I believe, key to an
intrinsically machinic notion of intelligence, a machine’s potential to be intelligible
and, furthermore, at the core of the complex relationships we can develop with a
machine.
It is important to reiterate, however, that a thing becoming a body does not mean it
becomes a subject. While the potential of our relational approach stems from a
posthumanist worldview in which subjects and objects (humans and artefacts)
mutually constitute each other, Suchman reminds us that mutualities are not

necessarily symmetries. Her own analysis suggests “that persons and artifacts do not
constitute each other in the same way”
71
. The sensations and agencies that are enacted
in this encounter, naturally have different values and effects for people and robot. For
a start, the robot only has a limited access to our “culturally and historically
constituted resources for meaning making”
72
. Rather, my argument is that thinking
relationally opens up approaches to machinic design that allow for already always
emerging relations to unfold and to be recognized, without undermining this potential
by presenting robots “as if they had feelings”
73
. As mentioned earlier, a machine,
moving to relate based on its own machinic embodiment, rather than mimicking other
bodies’ behaviours, destabilises subject object boundaries and instead opens up a
space in-between.
There is much research on a moving body’s capacity to resonate with the observer
74
,
arguing that observed movement literally moves and bodily affects us
75
. This
resonance also fuels our engagement with moving bodies, as we are compelled to
anticipate the trajectory of movements
76
. This is also interesting in relation to human-
machine configurations and a machine’s potential to ‘make sense’ to other (human)
bodies with regards to its potential for action
77
.
However, the external position of the ‘observer’ is problematic here, as it still locates
agency and affect within each separate body. Rather, it is only through the encounter
that agency and affect are enacted across bodies. What is referred to as resonance
here, is the relation made felt between the two bodies. The other encountering body
positioned as an external observer, creates what Barad calls “an agential cut”
78
to
effect a separation between the two bodies, rendering the observing body cut off and
passive.
In contrast, a relational approach foregrounds the encounter of subjects and objects;
indeed, according to Barad
79
, subjects and objects emerge in the encounter. This intra-
action also is where the social is enacted, thus, robots are not only specific material
configurations but become specific social entities in the process of negotiating these
configurations, both in the making (the design process) and enacting (as we encounter
and engage with them). Counter to dominant assumptions in social robotics, agency,
sociality and intelligibility are not human characteristics that can be bestowed on a
humanoid robot, but a matter of intra-acting
80
. Sensation, too, is enacted in the
encounter as it constitutes, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, a “zone of indeterminacy
between subject and object, the bloc that erupts from the encounter of the one with the
other”
81
. Meaning can thus emerge from a flow of agency and affect, enacted in the
encounter through movement, rather than from specific humanlike embodiments or
behaviours. This opens up a notion of thinking with the machine and ‘machinic
intelligence’ that is quite different from that of importing humanlike intelligent
behaviour into a machinic body. One that is, however, well aligned with
understanding the machine’s potential for action
82
in terms of its situatedness. In
tandem with and inseparable from agency and affect, thinking here is intimately tied
to our entanglement with the world and an ongoing process of mutual reconfiguring; a
material, bodily enactment. Granted, as we learn to dance with the nonhuman, this
entanglement does not offer people an easy, effortless mirror image, pretending to
have eliminated or sufficiently blurred the boundary in-between. Rather, it seeks to
complicate subject object difference, rendering the boundary relational and dynamic,
and, by doing so, opening up a new playground for humans and machines. !

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!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
1
Andrew Pickering, ‘The Next Macy Conference: A New Interdisciplinary
Synthesis. Keynote’ in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 34 (2014), p. 38.
2
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 175.
3
Rolf Pfeifer quoted in Katrin Weigmann, ‘Does intelligence require a body?’ in
EMBO Reports 13 (2013), p. 1067.
4
Noel Sharkey, ‘The evitability of autonomous robot warfare’ in International Review
of the Red Cross 94 (2012).
5
Judy Wajcman, ‘Automation, robotics and the promise of an easier life’ (Lecture at
Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, 02 March 2016).
<http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2268>.
6
Maja J. Matarić and Francois Michaud, ‘Behavior-Based Robotics’ in Handbook of
Robotics (Springer, 2008), p. 891.
7
Terrence Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh and Kerstin Dautenhahn, ‘A survey of socially
interactive robots’ in Robotics and Autonomous Systems 42 (2003).
8
Luc Steels, ‘Fifty Years of AI: From Symbols to Embodiment – and Back’ in M.
Lungarella, F. Iida, J. Bongard, R. Pfeifer (eds) 50 Years of Artificial Intelligence:
Essays Dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Artificial Intelligence (Berlin and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
Heidelberg: Springer, 2007), p. 23.
9
!Ibid.!
10
Ibid.
11
See Andrew Pickering, ‘Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask’ in
Social Studies of Science 32 (2002).
12
Tom Ziemke, ‘The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist
Perspectives on Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics’ in A. Riegler
(ed) special issue on ‘The Impact of Radical Constructivism on Science’, Foundations
of Science 6 (2001), p. 164.
13
See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The embodied mind:
Cognitive science and human experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
14
Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 15.
15
See Ziemke, ‘The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist
Perspectives on Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics’.
16
Tom Ziemke, ‘The body of knowledge: On the role of the living body in grounding
embodied cognition’ in BioSystems 148 (2016).
17
Ibid., p. 7.
18
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions.
19
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning.
20
Ibid., p. 826.
21
Lucy Suchman, ‘Subject Objects’ in Feminist Theory 12 (2011), p.121.
22
Fong et al, ‘A survey of socially interactive robots’, p. 145.

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!
23
Kerstin Dautenhahn, ‘Human–robot interaction’ in M. Soegaard & R.F. Dam (eds)
Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (Aarhus: Interaction Design
Foundation, 2nd ed.), 2013.
24
Suchman, ‘Subject Objects’, p. 122.
25
Ibid., p. 133.
26
Dautenhahn, ‘Human–robot interaction’.
27
Also see Suchman’s argument on “technological imaginaries” in Human-Machine
Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, p. 213-214.
28
See Wajcman, ‘Automation, robotics and the promise of an easier life’, and
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions.
29
Wajcman, ‘Automation, robotics and the promise of an easier life’, Fong et al, ‘A
survey of socially interactive robots’.
30
Ziemke, ‘The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist Perspectives on
Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics’, p. 180.
31
Doug Lenat and Edward, P. Feigenbaum, ‘On the Thresholds of Knowledge’ in
Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), p.216.
32
Jennifer Robertson, Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan’ in Body
Society 16 (2010).
33
Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard, How The Body Shapes The Way We Think: A New
View Of Intelligence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), p. 348.
34
This project is supported under Australian Research Council's Discovery
Projects funding scheme (DP160104706), with Lead Chief Investigator Petra
Gemeinboeck, Chief Investigator Rob Saunders, and Partner Investigators Maaike
Bleeker and Ben Robins.
35
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, p. 243.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
36
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 193.
37
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, ‘Just Like That: William Forsythe, Between
Movement and Language’ in G. Brandstetter, G. Egert, S. Zubarik (eds.) Touching
and to Be Touched. Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement (Berlin:
DeGruyter, 2013).
38
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28
(2003).
39
James Leach and Scott deLahunta, Scott, ‘Dance ‘Becoming’ Knowledge’ in
Leonardo (Cambridge: MIT Press, accepted for publication, April 13, 2015), p. 8.
40
Catherine Stevens and Shirley McKechnie, ‘Thinking in action: thought made
visible in contemporary dance’ in Cognitive Processing 6 (2005), p. 243.
41
Scott DeLahunta, Gill Clarke, Phil Barnard, ‘A conversation about choreographic
thinking tools’ in Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 3 (2012), p. 247.
42
Tess De Quincey, video recording (26 March 2015), unpublished.
44
DeLahunta et al, ‘A conversation about choreographic thinking tools’, p. 248.
45
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
46
Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter’.
47
Edwin Hutchins, ‘Cognitive Ecology’ in Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010).
48
See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement
of Matter and Meaning.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
49
Lucy Suchman, ‘Agencies in technology design: Feminist reconfigurations’ in
Online Proceedings of the 5th European Symposium on Gender and ICT. Digital
Cultures. Participation – Empowerment – Diversity (University of Bremen, March 5 -
7, 2009), p. 2.
50
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning, p. ix.
51
See Ibid.
52
Donna Haraway, Donna,
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse, Feminism and
Technosciemce (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. xiii.
53
See Leach and deLahunta, ‘Dance ‘Becoming’ Knowledge’.
54
See Carrie Noland, Agency and embodiment: Performing gestures/producing culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
55
Stephan Suschke, Müller macht Theater: Zehn Inszenierungen und ein Epilog
(Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003), p. 205.
56
De Quincey, video recording (unpublished).
57
Stevens and McKechnie, ‘Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary
dance’, p. 245.
58
Ibid., p. 246.
59
Pfeifer and Bongard, How The Body Shapes The Way We Think: A New View Of
Intelligence
60
See Jackie Stacey and Lucy Suchman, ‘Animation and Automation: The liveliness
and labours of bodies and machines’ in Body and Society 18 (2012).
61
Ziemke, ‘The Construction of ‘Reality’ in the Robot: Constructivist Perspectives on
Situated Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Robotics’, p. 220.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
62
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, ‘On the impact of robotics in behavioral and cognitive
sciences: from insect navigation to human cognitive development’ in IEEE
Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 2 (2010).
63
Ryo Saegusa, Giorgio Metta, Giulio Sandini and Sophie Sakka, ‘Active motor
babbling for sensorimotor learning’ in Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (2008).
64
Fong et al, ‘A survey of socially interactive robots’
65
Ibid.
66
Stevens and McKechnie, ‘Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary
dance’, p. 248.
67
Rob Saunders, ‘Towards autonomous creative systems: A computational approach’
in Special issue on ‘Computational Creativity, Intelligence and Autonomy’, Cognitive
Computation 4 (2012).
68
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The primacy of movement (Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing, 2011), p. 136.
69
Leach and deLahunta, ‘Dance ‘Becoming’ Knowledge’, p. 6.
70
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning, p. 149.
71
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, p. 269,
original emphasis.
72
Ibid., p. 15.
73
Wajcman, ‘Automation, robotics and the promise of an easier life’.
74
Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Movement’s Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of
Performance’ in Tracy C. Davis (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Performance
Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008), Ivar Hagendoorn, ‘Some

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and
Choreography’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004), and Stevens and
McKechnie, ‘Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary dance’.
75
See Foster, ‘Movement’s Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of Performance’.
76
Hagendoorn, ‘Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of
Dance and Choreography’.
77
Varela et al, The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience.
78
Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter’, p. 815, original emphasis.
79
Ibid.
80
See Karen Barad, ‘Nature's queer performativity’ in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities
and Social Sciences 19 (2011), and Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics
and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
81
Elisabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 73.
82
Varela et al, The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience.
!