Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances

Robots are becoming increasingly visible in our lives as AI technology is going through unprecedented transformations. This is an important moment to pose questions of how the design features of these robots -both their physical and interaction design - shape their modes of relating, and correspondingly structure how we (humans) might relate to them. This paper describes work studying human-robot interactions through collaborative human-robot artistic performance. It introduces an initial project, Dances with Robots, and current work Beyond the Black Box - which function both as artistic performance and an intervention method to observe/study the changes in human perceptions/feelings towards robots. Through this work, the authors have witnessed how human performers' feelings and attitudes towards their robot collaborators have changed through time spent in rehearsal and in cooperative performance. Inspired by these observations, this paper introduces the research idea of studying human-robot interaction through robot-human performance artwork.