The Robot's Heart: Tinkering with Humanity and Intimacy in Robot-Building

Abstract

This paper explores the processes by which humanoid robots become sites of affective investment in contemporary Japan. It particularly analyses how narratives of intimacy, conventionally found in relationships between humans, are being reproduced and embodied in interactions with humanoid robots. It uses ethnographic research on participants in Robo-One, one of Japan's most popular robotics events, to examine the development of intimate relationships between the human and the robotic, understood in terms of kokoro (loosely translated as ‘heart’). The robot's heart emerges in the grey area between technological material and human imagination. Through the respective processes of tinkering and spectating, both robot builders and ‘robot watchers’ experience the intimacy that results from apprehending the robot's heart. This experience creates an endless hermeneutic circle, drawing together subject and object, original and copy, creator and created, and watcher and watched, to ultimately reconfigure participants' senses of their own kokoro.

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