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Robotics is largely embedded into our culture. A multitude of interdisciplinary links to literature, film, philosophy or art indicate that robots have long been anticipated before there was the technology to build them. Fictional robots, cyborgs, androids and homunculi embody the age-old dream to create lifelike beings. Albeit an engineering science discipline situated between mechatronics and artificial intelligence, this background makes robotics a unique impetus to study ourselves in the mirror of our artefacts.

Nurobot's interest and competence is to follow these links and to shed light onto their historical and current form and their cultural and sociological meaning. If you seek support in these fields, we offer:

  • Enquiry works, surveys, talks, consulting and studies for public and corporate customers: museums, exhibitions, press, workshops organizers or companies

We speak German, English and French.

Philosophy
From the Cartesian mind-body dualism, over La Mettrie's men-machine to gender theory and the cyborg discourse: robotics has been a technical and philosophical transdiscipline from its beginning on. Artifical creatures are unique opportunities for questions in metaphysics, linguistics and logic or simply: "what is a human being?"

Art
Not only that the word robot has been coined in a theatre play (R.U.R by Karel Capek, Prag, 1920), the first humanoid robot has been built by Nam June Paik in 1964 roughly ten years before Wabot-1 at Waseda University, Japan. Today "robot art" receives an increasing attention by art schools and their young graduates.

Literature
Artifical creatures populate our myths, fairy tales and stories. Figures such as Hephaistos' golden maids, Golem, Pygmalion, Frankenstein's monster, Pinocchio, E.T.A. Hoffmann's Olimpia or Asimov's empathic robots are deeply grounded into the Western culture. They tell the story of the grace, the poetry, the dilemma and the melancholy of being artificial.

Film
Robots walk as glamourous icons across the movie screen since the early days of filmmaking. From Metropolis' Maria to Gort, Robbie and Astroboy in the fiftees, R2-D2 and 3-CPO in the seventies, RoboCop, Terminator and Johnny 5 in the eightees, A.I. and Data in the ninetees and so on, movies made robots what they are today: part of our popular culture.

Science
Robotics is an engineering science discipline with connections to physics, biology, cognitive science, ethology, neurophysiology and many more. Members of these communities all gather around the holy grail "how to build a system that is intelligent (or at least behaves intelligently)?"

Design
Robot design is finding a form that deliberately works with the complex interplay of our projections, perceptions and expectations when robots look and behave lifelike. Machine morphologies have to be developed that exploit, break and play with this fact. Beyond form, robot design is also design of new interaction languages and design of new kinds of emotional relationships.

Anthropology
Technology is never neutral. The machines we produce always reflect the values of the social group in which they occur. Robots have a particularly strong symbolic impact making it insightful to study the selection of human values that are embedded in them. This gives us a better idea about how humans describe themselves and this is a main anthropological issue.

Exhibitions
Robotic devices are new scenographic tools for museums, exhibitions and events. As by their mere existence, robots evoke questions on identity, intelligence and emotion, they can become powerful messengers of an exhibition concept. The challenge is to find sustainable implementations and new forms: tactile 3D interfaces, robotized furniture or gesticulating information kiosks.

Example Project

In collaboration with the Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL and the Institute of Anthropology and Sociology of the University of Lausanne we conducted a 2000-people survey on the questions if people are ready to share their life and body with robots.
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Example Project

The Museum für Kommunikation in Bern will open the permanent exhibition "As Time Goes Byte" on digital culture in 2007. There will be consoles with interactive anthologies on digital technologies. Nurobot contributed the anthology on robotics.
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