EMCAI Meeting – Friday 26 September – 12.30-14.00 CET

This will be a show-and-tell meeting, both accessible to those who have not attended last semester and following somewhat on prior discussions.

Please find the descriptions of both show-and-tells below.

Iullia Avgustis will present some data consisting of video recordings of the quadruped robot Spot (Boston Dynamics), remotely controlled by a hidden “wizard” in public settings. A multi-camera set-up captured both the wizard’s control actions and, through two cameras mounted on Spot, people’s interactions with the robot. The wizards were instructed to act “as a robot”, yet Spot’s dog-like appearance and movement affordances shaped how people oriented to it and constrained what the wizards could do. Because many people treated Spot as a dog, wizards often adapted their control to accentuate dog-like behaviors (a pattern also reflected in post-recording interviews). This data is shared to invite discussion on how a posthumanist perspective might inform ethnomethodological analysis, and whether it matters analytically to treat Spot’s ‘dogness’ as a collaborative accomplishment at the intersection of the material affordances, wizard’s practices and people’s methods of interacting with the robot.

Lynn de Rijk works on a project that uses both human-robot and human-animal data, and will present a video recording collected in a Dutch cat café, of which different data has been previously shown at a meeting in September 2024. The fragment selected this time concerns interaction between a café patron and two cats, one initiated by the human and one by one of the cats. Analyzing human-cat data raises several questions we also encounter when analyzing human-robot interaction, questions and similarities on which we might be able to reflect using this fragment. Among other things, these concern questions of reciprocity, (mutual) adaptability, interactionally surfacing expectations of the other, and the interactional problem participants face of asymmetrical bodily affordances. The data might be especially interesting in relation to the data Iuliia brings forth.