Hanna Gerda Brøndal og Andrea Tešanović. Honey, Did You Charge the Robot? A Seminar on Robotic Aesthetics and Intimacy

Hanna Gerda Brøndal & Andrea Tešanović 

Honey, Did You Charge the Robot? A Seminar on Robotic Aesthetics and Intimacy
 

Ideas about robots have haunted the human imagination since antiquity's self-moving automata, though it was Karel Čapek's 1920 theatre play R.U.R. that finally gave them the name, robota. They have always been performers and vibrant images: technological artefacts born of cultural fantasies, protagonists of countless science-fiction futures. Today, they inhabit our public institutions — factories, schools, hospitals, shops — and are discreetly crossing into our most private space: the home.
This talk moves past questions of function and utility to ask how aesthetics shapes the ways we encounter, imagine, and form relationships with robots. Focusing on the intimate spaces of domestic life, from speculative life-sized sex bots to soft robotics and non-anthropomorphic companions, Brøndal and Tešanović ask what happens when robots, surpassing their instrumental role, start living alongside us in our homes. Drawing on art history, aesthetics, science fiction, theatre and performance, and current research in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), the seminar traces the unfolding human-robot intimacies.
 

Hanna Gerda Brøndal is a PhD student and Fulbright Scholar at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University who focuses on the intersection between art history and social robotics. Her research examines how robots aesthetically enact notions of sociality, with a particular focus on materiality. She has published two articles in Passepartout – Journal for Art History, and has presented her research at the Royal Danish Embassy in Tokyo. In addition, she is an associate of the SDU Soft Robotics Lab and a member of Patient-Centered Art and Culture, an advisory board of the hospitals of the North Denmark Region that aims to integrate art and technology into patient healing and staff well-being. 

Andrea Tešanović is a PhD student at the University of Southern Denmark whose research explores the intersection of robotics, aeshtetics, and science fiction. As part of the research project The Aesthetics of Bio-machines and the Question of Life, her PhD project examines how emerging robotic technologies reshape understandings of embodiment, companionship, and aritificial life. With a background in transdisciplinary humanities spanning media art, performance, digital media, and cultural and aesthetic studies, she has previously worked with organizations including Art Electronica, the United Nations, and Dimension Lab. She is a member of the SDU Soft Robotics research lab and associate of the Center for Culture and Technology.

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen og Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

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