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four  Humanoid Boogie Re›ections on Robotic Performance Philip Auslander Some people say it with ›owers, some people say it with Lloyd’s. But you don’t ‹nd many trying to say it with humanoids —The Bonzo Dog Band, “Humanoid Boogie” Sergei Shutov’s Abacus (2001) in the Russian pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennial International Exposition of Art (June 10–November 4, 2001) was a frequent subject of discussion during the press opening for the exhibition , which I attended in my capacity as a critic of the visual arts. Abacus consists of over forty crouching ‹gures draped in black, which face an open door and pray in numerous languages representing a multitude of faiths while making the reverential movements appropriate to prayer. Nearby video monitors display the texts of the prayers in their many alphabets. People at the opening talked of the “performance” in the Russian pavilion; a journalistic colleague, knowing that performance is the main subject of my research and writing, asked me whether I considered the piece a performance. I blithely answered yes, realizing only later that I had taken a position I needed to consider further. The reason for both my colleague’s question and my own desire to think more about it is that the ‹gures performing in Abacus are not human beings—they are robots programmed by a computer to engage in dahvening (Jewish prayer) movements accompanied by the recorded sounds of ecumenical prayer. Given that the ‹gures are machines, not human beings, some might argue that the piece should be considered an animated sculptural installation, not a performance—it is described as an installation in the Biennale catalog. (The ‹gures could also be considered automata, or the whole system 87 could be seen as a playback device, possibilities I will consider shortly.) I prefer to think of it as a performance, however, not just because I believe that machines can perform but also because to view a piece such as Abacus as a performance by machines yields rich possibilities for its interpretation. At the most basic level, the question “Can machines perform?” can only be answered in the af‹rmative. After all, the primary meaning of the verb to perform is simply “to do.” Inasmuch as machines (or human beings) do things, they perform. Moving from that basic level to the context of art practices, however, the de‹nition of performance proves to be contextspeci ‹c, not universal; it changes according to the particular aesthetic form and tradition under consideration. What it means to perform a piece of classical music is not the same as what it means to perform jazz, and neither musical de‹nition of performance is applicable to the theater, dance, or performance art. One crucial area of difference is the assumed relationship of the performer to the text being performed: the relationship of a classical musician to the piece is not the same as that of a jazz musician to the music she performs, for instance, and the respective relationships of actors to dramas and dancers to choreography put still other variables into play. If the de‹nition of performance is context-dependent, so is the determination of what counts as a performer. To the question of whether the robots in Abacus should be considered elements in a sculptural installation , automata, parts of a playback system, or performers in their own right, I offer an inclusive response: they are all of these things. Credible arguments can be advanced for each of these identi‹cations, and the categories are not mutually exclusive (an automaton could be an element in an installation or part of a playback system, for instance). How one chooses to describe the robots depends primarily not on their intrinsic properties but on the artistic tradition to which one wishes to assimilate them. In this essay, the artistic tradition in which I ultimately will place the robots is that of performance art. Brief considerations of the Abacus robots as parts of a playback system or automata will help to shed light on what is at stake in my identi‹cation of them as performers. In his estimable study of musical performance, to which I shall refer repeatedly here, Stan Godlovitch discriminates the playback of a recording from a performance: “The playback is no more a performance than the photograph is the thing photographed. . . . In a recording , I hear an acoustic image of a performance given necessarily at some past time.”1 From a technical standpoint, Abacus is indeed...

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