Beyond the Black Box: A Girl and Her Dog

Qualcomm Institute IDEAS Series 2024

On Friday, May 3, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series presented “Beyond the Black Box: A Girl and Her Dog,” a performative exploration within a series of human robot interactions.

Combining the talents of playwright Hortense Gerardo, director of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) Program, UC San Diego Teaching Professor Amy Eguchi and University of Nebraska-Lincoln Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts Robert Twomey, “Beyond the Black Box” explores questions of whether robots can generate a sense of fun defined as “pleasure with surprises.”

The work was loosely informed by the story of Eurydice, “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Toy Story,” and featured six interactive robots and a selection of robots from past research projects conducted at UC San Diego. “Beyond the Black Box: A Girl and Her Dog” is part of the series “Dances with Robots” and will be informed by data from creative AI research experiments performed by the APT Program.

Previous Work

Beyond the Black Box Performance Lecture at SLSA 2023.
More about Beyond the Black Box on Hortense Gerardo’s website.
Trailer for Beyond the Black Box
Builds on Dances with Robots from December 2022
Video from Beyond the Black Box @ SLSA
More about Dances with Robots on Hortense Gerardo’s website.

Beyond the Black Box SLSA

Beyond the Black Box is a performance and lecture on embodied interactions in humans and machines. Over the course of 30 minutes, three human and robot participants unpack the ways that intelligence and creativity require a body. Through a mix of spoken text, collaborative movement, and embodied interaction—the performance explores elements of intimacy and play in human-robot interaction, and ultimately wrestle with who (and what) might properly be considered an embodied intelligence.

Our three presenters are Hortense Gerardo (movement), CRANE (co-robotic arm with Twomey as operator), and PEPPER (humanoid robot with Eguchi as operator). Collectively, this group has deep prior experience in performance and movement (Gerardo), creative robotics (Twomey) and human-robot interaction (Eguchi and Twomey).

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Artificial Intelligence technologies are commonly referred to as Black Box technologies. This is due to our lack of insight into the models, their lack of explainability. Similarly, robots driven by AI algorithms are frequently opaque in the operations and decision making. The goal of this project, “Beyond the Black Box”, is to open up these boxes and reveal something of the algorithms and design choices that shape our interactions with robots.

We ask what roles our bodies—robotic, humanoid, human—play in establishing intimacy and trust in human-robot interactions. How do the particular features of these bodies, their overall design—whether anthropomorphic familiarity, alien beauty, or some uncanny in-between—shape what types of relationships are possible between humans and machines.