Encountering Robotic Art: The Social, Material, and Temporal Processes of Creation with Machines

TL;DR

This study investigates how robots participate in artistic creation beyond productivity by conducting in-depth interviews with nine professional robotic artists. Using a constructivist grounded-theory approach, it identifies three interacting dimensions—social, material, and temporal—that shape creative value: the co-constitution of artists, robots, audiences, and environments in space-time. The authors articulate four thematic facets (embodiment/materiality, malfunction, audience reception, and creation/exhibition) and offer a framework of socially informed, material-attentive, and process-oriented design for computing systems to foster creativity in the arts. The findings have practical implications for HCI and art domains, informing the design of interactive, resilient, and audience-aware robotic creative practice across media, craft, digital fabrication, and tangible computing.

Abstract

Robots extend beyond the tools of productivity; they also contribute to creativity. While typically defined as utility-driven technologies designed for productive or social settings, the role of robots in creative settings remains underexplored. This paper examines how robots participate in artistic creation. Through semi-structured interviews with robotic artists, we analyze the impact of robots on artistic processes and outcomes. We identify the critical roles of social interaction, material properties, and temporal dynamics in facilitating creativity. Our findings reveal that creativity emerges from the co-constitution of artists, robots, and audiences within spatial-temporal dimensions. Based on these insights, we propose several implications for socially informed, material-attentive, and process-oriented approaches to creation with computing systems. These approaches can inform the domains of HCI, including media and art creation, craft, digital fabrication, and tangible computing.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Actors/actants in robotic art practice and their interactive relations. Robotic art practice unfolds primarily in two spaces: the creation space where interactions happen mainly between artists and robots, and the exhibition space where interactions mostly involve audiences and robots. The two spaces constitute the ENVIRONMENT plane. Within the plane, directed arrows between the actors indicate the types of interaction. For example, the Design arrow indicates that the artist designs the robot(s), and the Revise arrow indicates that the robot(s) make the artist revise artistic ideas. All the actors/actants may also intra-act with the ENVIRONMENT. The actors/actants and their interactive relations may differ at different times along the axis of TEMPORAL PROCESS that is orthogonal to the plane.