Article:

Zeigt auf den Roboter und schüttelt dessen Hand. Intimität als situativ gebundene interaktionale Unterstützung von Humantechnologien

This paper deals with the problem of digital media and intimacy by focusing on the domain of social robotics. Based in an ethnographic study of laboratories of social robotics, intimacy, in this context, concerns the situated maintenance of technology intended as ‹social›. The article points out how robots are enacted as social and how they gain their own agency through an intertwining of their bodies with multimodal and multisensory elements of multiparty action in specific situations of design and use. Drawing from video-recordings of everyday practice, the article indicates how this takes place in the interactional and sensory realm, focusing on coordination of gesture, talk, body orientation, tactile engagement, spatial organization and arrangements of things and human bodies in laboratory work. This idea of intimacy is contrasted with the «distance» that is characteristic of the situations where the human-robot relationship is reduced to the ocular mode and often results in violence or its spectacularization. The paper points out how considering a social robot in respect to the situation in which it is immersed and regarding those present at the scene has consequences for the commonly assumed idea of self and agency.