Especially for the Stepford-style Fembot, it is very difficult for a performer to act as slowly as I feel she should. With the video played at two-thirds, or even half of normal speed, a woman's speech pattern seems more halting and her motions more deliberate. Videos are therefore also longer to enjoy.
Kimmy’s interpretation of “robot hands” has her fingers stiffly separated from each other, expressing the wrong amount of tension. For the robot, hands should rest the position in which the fingers fall when no positional data are available. For humans, this requires some tension, to hold the joints in that position. It would be better if she held her fingers loosely open, separate but not at all stretched. With that relaxed, open orientation, her hands extend straight from her arms with unbent wrists. She may imagine moving them as if her hands ended at the wrists.
In Robolust and elsewhere, do you feel that the performers arms hang correctly? My instinct is that their position should represent the low-energy state, the angle of rotation of the arm at the shoulder at which there is no torque. With a proud, chest-forward posture, a mannequin-like robot’s arms may thus hang comfortably. The common mistake, as I see it, is to portray how a marionette’s arms would hang, hunched forward.
Additionally, a performer’ ares arms need not be stuck fast at the same angle of bend at the elbow. Less bent than 90° suggests more tension than required, while bends above 45 degrees tend to look like they are hanging too low, like they were broken at the elbow.
Kimmy’s skirt and hair are out of place from early on. Kimmy has not performed any strenuous malfunctioning yet, so early on the less of this disordered appearance the better. Long hair is beautiful, but hair cut short, firmly styled, or discretely pinned back are the only ways to guarantee avoiding mussed-up hair. Similarly, some outfits are more resistant to disarray than others.
Kimmy's predicament of being hacked is matched by the unhappy expression on her face; the worried tone of her words; and the worried meaning of her words. Ideally, these should disagree to some degree, like if she spoke her worried words in a happy, calm intonation; or if the meaning of her words celebrated her damage, while her intonations were simultaneously downbeat and depressive. Her speech may be monotonic or staccato, or both; but there is a magic to melodically rising and falling intonations, delivered at an incongruously robotic rhythm; or with a normal pace and rhythm of speech but using the same flat intonation for each syllable.
Kimmy trembles when her rear panel is probed. Trembling while sitting is not a low energy, default robot action. Trembling is not like discrete tics which mimic a shorting electrical discharge. This trembling and her speech pattern betray her level of concern, as do her tone, and her facial expressions. This coherence between aspects of her behavior is more suggestive of a person, or at least a robot that possesses personhood. A robot malfunctioning would lose the capacity to keep these qualities reliably in alignment.
Unlike human eyes, robot eyes will not so frequently scan the room, or dart occasionally to confirm the location and intentions of a person in the room. That behavior is human vigilance arising from a self-protective ego. The robot need not gather additional information nearly as often, and does not generate gratuitous eye motion as a measure of personal insecurity.
- Dale Coba
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