Hello, Robot: Vitra presents an exhibition about the future of robot culture

“Spot” is the name of the new star in robot theater. In 2016, the four-legged device, which looks like a bright yellow chimera made up of a construction site machine and a Doberman, was presented to the public for the first time. Something about the Boston Dynamics thing also reminds of a sophisticated weapon. This is probably due to the inventors. The autonomous walking robot was originally developed for the US military. Together with two large Japanese toy robots, Spot forms the welcoming committee in the exhibition “Hello, Robot – Design between Man and Machine” in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.

With more than 150 exhibits, the thematic show is dedicated to the cultural history of robotics on the one hand, but also takes up contemporary discourses on the smart machines that accompany contemporary humans throughout their lives, from birth to death. This topicality is probably one of the reasons for the new edition. Because the presentation that has just opened is a minimally supplemented and expanded version of an exhibition that was originally shown here for the first time five years ago and then went on an international tour. It is considered the most successful exhibition in the history of the museum, which was founded in 1989, and is now returning to its place of origin.

Perhaps the most famous, certainly the nicest robots in the world: C-3PO and R2-D2 (from left), seen for the first time in 1977 in the Star Wars film “A New Hope”.

(Photo: 2017 Lucasfilm Ltd.)

At the heart of the robot discourse is work. That is one of the theses in the show, which is dedicated to a total of 14 key questions. For example: “Do you think your job could be done by a robot?” And because the word “fear” is avoided, it is all the more clear in the room. From its earliest origins, the word “robot” has been associated with industrial action. The inventor of the term is the Czech writer Karel Čapek, who published a drama entitled “RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” in the early 1920s, in which the eponymous company produces human-like machines that are used as cheap and rightsless workers. The origin of the robot term lies in the Czech “robota”, which can be translated as “corporate service” or “forced labour”. Finally, in Čapek’s play, the robots violently rebel against the people who are exploiting them. So the uprising of the machines began in the theater.

Three Laws of Robotics

The portable Motorola mini-computers that Amazon workers have to strap to their forearms at the start of their shift show that there is often no real distinction between machines and people in the accelerated late capitalism. They measure the fulfillment of inhumane productivity targets. Resistance to such exploitative practices is increasingly met with the establishment of trade unions. In the early days of industrialization, on the other hand, dissatisfied French workers are said to have often thrown their clumsy wooden shoes, so-called “sabots”, into the machines. The pair of shoes that the New York artist Tyler Coburn had produced with a 3D printer in a fully automated factory in 2016 is based on such shoes.

Weil is also reminiscent of the “Three Laws of Robotics”, which the Russian-American author Isaac Asimov formulated in a short story in 1942. First, a robot must not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be harmed. Second, a robot must obey orders given to it by a human – unless such an order would conflict with the first law. And third, a robot must protect its existence as long as that protection does not conflict with law one or two. If these “laws” were actually applied, then there would probably be no combat drones, among other things.

Robots in everyday life: will robots soon take away our jobs?  Vincent Fournier explores the interfaces between science, utopia and social criticism: scene out "The Man Machine"2010.

Will robots soon take away our jobs? Vincent Fournier explores the intersections of science, utopia and social criticism: Scene from “The Man Machine”, 2010.

(Photo: Vincent Fournier/Vincent Fournier)

“Everything becomes a robot as soon as it’s smart,” says Amelie Klein, one of the exhibition curators. If this definition is correct, then we have long been living in a robot world. Tesla boss Elon Musk, who describes the automotive group he manages as “the largest robotics company in the world”, seems to see it similarly. According to Musk, Tesla cars are “like semi-intelligent robots on wheels”. But all the robotic sophistication does not protect against breakdowns. In Switzerland, the news of an incident from 2020, which massively calls into question the suitability of Tesla automobiles as police cars, caused amusement. According to reports, two police officers in Basel had massive problems chasing a fleeing cyclist because the electronically controlled doors of the car blocked at the crucial moment. The officers who wanted to arrest the fugitive were suddenly trapped themselves in their car.

Do people fit in with technology?

Living with advanced technology has a lot of slapstick potential. Director and actor Jacques Tati already knew this, playing the pipe-chewing main character Monsier Hulot in a silent battle with a state-of-the-art kitchen in his modern classic “Mon Oncle” from 1958. The topos of the human being, which does not fit well with highly developed technology, remains relevant. In the future, too, life between the sensors will somehow feel awkward. At least that’s the tenor of the speculative science fiction video “A Digital Tomorrow” from 2012, which was produced by a sympathetically technology-skeptical group of students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The camera accompanies a fictional literary agent in near-future Los Angeles throughout the day and shows how she routinely struggles with face recognition in her car before it can actually start. The nine-minute clip, which is well worth seeing, was part of a larger research project dealing with possible future gestures, postures and digital rituals associated with the everyday use of digital technologies such as computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots.

Such small technical difficulties are probably more of a marginal phenomenon for someone like Elon Musk. As a tech visionary, which the US entrepreneur likes to present himself as, it’s all about the future. Musk wants to present the prototype of a Tesla bot soon. The working title of the device in the form of a humanoid all-purpose robot is “Optimus”. That sounds like “optimal” and “optimism” and thus also like the well-known world improvement hubris of the US technology giants from California. Does Musk know Karel Čapek’s robot play, which is more than a hundred years old? It could be that the tech optimist will at some point come across a sabot as a shoe from the 3D printer out of the darkness of those deserted and lightless factory halls of the future, which are becoming more and more common these days.

Hello, Robot – design between man and machine. Until March 5, 2023 at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. The catalog costs 49.90 euros.

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