Attack of the Cleaning Robots!

Josephine Anstey, founding member of the Intermedia Performance Studio and faculty member in the University of Buffalo’s Media Study Department, uses Roomba-style cleaners to explore the ways in which people perceive service workers and the manner in which our understanding of social space varies depending on our notions of hierarchy and status.  The guerrilla installation, Workers of the World, unleashes a small herd of cleaning robots who go about their duties while exchanging text drawn from the works of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Peter Weiss, such as this scene from Weiss’s Marat/Sade. The actions of the robots in Workers of the World–including the exchange of dialogue–vary when people approach or stop to watch.

Beyond the programming factors involved in the performance and the surreal value of a cleaning robot exclaiming “Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough/then we saw thousands were still too few,” Workers of the World provides a clever twist on the relationship between technology, social status, and “voice.”  From Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times–in which a good-natured but helpless worker lives in a world in which only technology can speak–artists have used technology as an arena for exploring the idea of social invisibility. While cute or vaguely menacing (depending upon one’s point of view), the little robots in the performance raise questions about how one perceives others, and the ways in which one’s social status and the act of observation influence actions and conversations to which one is not even party.

The work, developed in collaboration with Stephen Hibit and Patrice Seyed, debuted at the Buffalo Infringement Festival and is being showcased as one of the current projects of the Digital Humanities Initiative.