Speed-dating to long-term relationships: Art-robot Residencies Enabled by Common Language

Connection requires common ground and common language. The theme of this collection, and it's associated workshops at ICRA 2024 and 2025, centers around the search for common ground and common language between roboticists and artists, and the conception of connection.

Innovations in technology have been providing creatives with novel methods of expression, reshaping and redefining their medium for expression. Artists are often the first to envision these new ideas beyond the intended use for which they were created by scientists and engineers. Through the course of time, cultural production has reflected the contemporaneity of society, and the latest discoveries of the day, for example, moving from oil to acrylic paint, newly developed vibrant colors that the Fauve artists embraced, the birth of photography, silkscreen photographs of Andy Warhol, new plastics used by Eva Hesse, video art of Nam June Paik and Tsaibernetic art – using sensors and motion to create experiences for viewers art by Wen-Ying Tsai, to name a few. More recently, we have the painting and drawing robots of Pindar Van Arman and Patrick Tresset. In the performing arts stage lights, automated cueing systems, live video projections, and, more recently, onstage machines provide a similar historical progression. Contemporary choreographers and performance artists, like Margot Apostolos, Merce Cunningham, Elizabeth Streb, William Forsythe, Stelarc, Greg Catellier, Bianca Li, Rebecca Lazier, Ilya Vidrin, and Kate Ladenheim have leveraged onstage machines and/or deep collaborations with engineers.

This Research Topic will focus on the relationship between artists and robotics researchers, diving into how these relationships develop and turn into mutually beneficial collaborations, through the increasingly common (though still relatively rare) practice of artist residencies in robotics research labs. Collaborations between artists and engineers open up new opportunities for the field of robotics. Applications where the expressive dimension of motion must be refined, specified, and curated are abounding in social robotics and artmaking practices: for example, painting robots that translate data models into fluid, stylized brushstrokes; companion robots that detect and respond with movement corresponding to culture, emotion, and other social contexts; and delivery robots that will inhabit public spaces, needing to make clear navigational gestures for human counterparts. Such challenges require tools from both robotics and the arts, but these domains can struggle to share common language, relying on vastly different training, methodologies and goals.

Through this edited Research Topic, we hope to:
• Highlight best practices from already established artist-roboticist relationships.
• Provide inspiration for emerging artists and robotics researchers to engage in interdisciplinary work crossing robotics into arts and vice-versa.
• Develop new connections between artists, dancers and roboticists.
• Offer a shared language for the experience of expressive movement which can connect roboticists, artists, and behavioral scientists.

This Research Topic is linked to the workshop of the same name taking place on May 17th, 2024 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Yokohama, Japan and a retrospective workshop that will reflect on the connections between art, dance, puppetry, control, and robotics created during a multi-year interdisciplinary research project on May 23rd, 2025 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Atlanta, Georgia. We encourage submissions from both attendees to the workshops as well as anyone who has a relevant contribution. For those papers previously published as conference proceedings, they must be extended to include 30% original content to be considered for this collection.

Examples of paper types that we hope to publish include, but are not limited to:
- Research articles based on interdisciplinary work in robotics and the arts.
- Pictorial submissions that highlight the aesthetic dimensions of an original work of art in a particular presentation.
- Interviews between artists and engineers that reflect on past work, interrogate current collaborations, and/or spark new connections. Such interviews should be transcribed faithfully but will benefit from light editing to ensure clarity and readability. Authors should provide proper context and/or narrative, e.g., through opening and closing remarks, to frame the conversation in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration in robotics and art.
- Position papers on best practices in bridging an often challenging disciplinary divide (where robotics often favors objective, quantitative analyses, the arts often favor subjective, qualitative ones).
- Presentation of taxonomies that can guide the work of artists and roboticists across various formats and methods of work, e.g., language that connects the development of new robots with techniques in sculpture.
- Detailed examinations of pedagogy and/or creative process that supports art-making, education, and/or research at the intersection between a subdomain of the arts and a subdomain of robotics.