Breathing Life into Familiar Domestic Objects

We consider robots that take their physical appearance from familiar domestic objects, FDOs. Such FDO robots are special kinds of non-anthropomorphic robots, whose possible expressiveness have been studied by several scholars recently. The present study concerns FDO robots specifically in staged performances. Familiar objects can be anything from a spoon, over TV sets and lamps, to a huge piece of furniture. Familiar objects mean that the audience will have some expectations what the object is and its properties as a non-animate object. When breathing life into a domestic objects (as a metaphor for making it into a robot), new performative qualities appear that play with the familiar expectations in dialogue with the expressions we have added to it. We present our initial work on a specific sort of FDO robots that obsess the bodies of an iconic brand of vacuum cleaners. Specifically, we have three main research questions: how to make FDO robots expressive, how to use FDO robots in dramaturgically interesting ways, and how to design supporting tools for using FDO robots in staged performances. This research is a collaboration between two different subjects at Roskilde University, Performance Design and Computer Science, closely integrated with this university's interdisciplinary and project oriented pedagogy for the benefit of both teaching and research.