A Robo-Pickup Artist Breaking Gender Norms

Abstract

Come Hither to Me! is feminist robot theater with the objective to break down gender roles and provoke the audience to question accepted norms and stereotypes. Inspired by pick-up artist strategies, the female robotic performer wanders the art gallery and initiates conversation with an audience member using an exaggerated flirtatious comment, followed by a series of compliments, negs (backward compliments), humorous remarks, and both personal and general questions. The conversation design engages the participant in a performative, entertaining interaction with the robot, so she can gain information about the audience member and use it to ultimately ask them out on a date. The objective of the interactions is not only to make the participant laugh and engage but also to make them slightly uncomfortable in order to provoke thoughts and bring attention to one's gendered expectations in normalized sexist societal structures. This critical, yet humorous, robotic performance exemplifies how social justice-oriented design, critical computing, camp aesthetics, and theater staging techniques can be applied to human-robot interaction for social/gender studies, digital performance, and robotic research.