‘Reconfiguring the Remainder’? – Robot Design, Adversarial Play, and Critical Aesthetics

• In Event: Art, Science and Technology Studies - V: Multidisciplinary Histories in Art and Science

Abstract

Carl DiSalvo’s (2012) Adversarial Design pursues a critical and arguably constructive motive. Its critical motive emphasizes contentious design and agonistic encounter, enabling disagreement and frame subversion, as a conspicuous challenge to the consensual surfaces of ‘design for politics’ (e.g., PR) and its ‘techniques of merging form and content in aesthetically compelling and functionally appropriate ways to support the means of governance’ (p. 8). Drawing upon a video ethnography of robot design, this paper pauses on the ‘arguably constructive motive’ of Adversarial Design, namely its design motive aiming at ‘reconfiguring the remainder’ (chap. 3). Drawing upon both Suchman (2006) and Honig (1993), DiSalvo defines this move and motive as an ‘agonistic tactic of including what is commonly excluded, giving it privilege, and making it the dominant character of the designed thing’ (p. 64). In turn, the present paper challenges this design motive for its questionable construction, as the motive’s ‘inclusive corrective’ takes for granted the exclusionary frame, if tactically so. To make its case, the paper presents a video analysis of adversarial play with so-called ‘educational robots,’ play that not only subverted a given frame (e.g., ‘AI’), but also instituted new games, if not a disjunctive différend (Lyotard 1984). In other words, the paper takes a particular interest in how the involved players, school kids and robot ethnographers, re- and co-design a ‘critical aesthetics’ on the fly.

Author

• Philippe Sormani, University of Lausanne