| Mechanical Love
by Phie Ambo
Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2009
52 mins., col., 2007
Distributor's website: http://www.icarusfilms.com.
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth
martha.blassnigg@gmail.com
Mechanical Love, by the Danish filmmaker Phie Ambo, starts with shots of a bamboo forest in Japan, a plant that traditionally symbolises strength of character and sense of self, and because it easily bends without breaking, grace as well. These images, accompanied with the sound of its leaves in the wind, intercut with close-ups of wires and electronics set the tone of the film, which from then on enters a world of silicon and circuits in robotic labs presenting human-machine interactions.
Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University (http://www.ed.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/), presents his studies of humanlike presence using tele-operated "geminoids", whereby sound (voice) and movement can be steered remotely through internet connection during an interaction with a human person. The difference with "humanoids" (robots in the shape of humans) and "androids" (robots that look and move like humans) is that "geminoids" -- a term deriving from "twin" -- resemble in their look-alike a specific person. Following earlier experiments, where Ishiguro's at the time four-year old daughter Lisa met her look-alike geminoid, the documentary guides us through the preparatory phase in the labs of a first test-run with Ishiguro's own "double" geminoid to meet his daughter and wife. Ishiguro points out that whereas working with androids challenges human likeliness, with geminoids he had to ask: "What is human presence?"
The sequences in Ishiguro's lab are intercut with a parallel track filmed in elderly homes in Europe (Germany, Italy, Denmark) showing peoples' engagement with Paro, a "sociable robot" that feeds back reactive behaviours. In contrast to the digital toy pet market, such as Tamagotchis, Paro appears in the shape of a white baby seal robot, 57 cm long with a weight of 2,7 kg, e quipped with sound localization, speech recognition sensors and sensational pads. This particular version of cybercompanionship -- what a study at MIT termed as "relational artefact" (Turkle et.al, 2006) -- is advertised as "mental commitment robot" and in the documentary presented by its inventor as welfare or therapeutic robot ( http://www.paro.jp/english/). Since its development for health care environments by Takanori Shibata, senior research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), various studies have been conducted to examine the potential to enhance social engagement of the elderly (See for example Taggart, et al, 2005). These inter-cuts are touching in their humanness; however, they are difficult to validate in relation to the timeframe of peoples' engagement with the robot toy since there is no indication of whether the initial fascination endures. Ambo does, however, situate the human-machine interaction in the broader context of a residential home in Germany. She presents for example the residents' opinions about a woman who lives with this new 'pet' that wouldn't stop squeaking while the choir practices Christmas songs and challenges as well as introduces new sets of interactive social behaviours.
The documentary is well directed and dramaturgically composed, and gradually leads to the climax of the film: the anticipated experiment that will expose Ishiguro's geminoid to his family. The compositional contrast with single elderly residents in homes with an apparent fully functional Japanese family (despite the fact that Ishiguro ambiguously refers to himself in family life as automaton) is well chosen to contrast perspectives. These should be viewed in their specific social and cultural environments and interrelations rather than, as some internet references suggest, in a problematic split between 'East' and 'West' -- (apart from the fact that the case studies are far too selective and small in scope for a valid comparison). Both Hiroshi Ishiguro and his wife, who only appears at the end of the film during this experiment, express a willingness to consider swapping their partner with a geminoid. Their seriousness appears relative in the context of the circumstances, and in this sense their engagement with, and comments about, this form of 'virtual reality' is reminiscent of presence-related interactive art, as it is reported for example from experiences in the interaction with the telematic installation art. Their daughter Lisa in contrast approaches it with down to earth common sense (rather than playfulness) in her reluctance to engage with the geminoid in her father's shape. In the earlier experiment, briefly shown as a flash-back, the first encounter with her own double made her cry inexplicably. Ishiguro comments in relation to this encounter that the Japanese saying, 'if you meet your double you die', did not come true. When meeting her father's geminoid, Lisa, now a few years older, refuses to touch the robot, ignores the leading questions posed by the geminoid (her father) and professes not to enjoy the experience with the machine. Questioned after the experiment if the robot had presence by posing questions about presence she is unable to respond in their terms since as she says: "I didn't think it was alive, so I didn't think it was dead either". In the film, Ishiguro's conflicting hopes as engineer and his fears as father dissolved and leads us to wonder if we really needed a child to point to the obvious: that the emperor was naked all along?
The film is not so much a film about androids or geminoids but rather what humans think about humans and humanness in the interaction with robots. After the much anticipated event of the experiment in a team meeting in the lab where the mood is obviously modest but positive, an engineer remarks: "We have to do more thinking. So that we can dream about it." - Ishiguro replies: "Don't you dream about it"? The lights in the labs go out, a researcher sleeps on his desk, a Paro-seal cuddles its companion comfortably to sleep, and Ishiguro's geminoid stares into the dark under the transparent plastic cover... the question remains: will it ever be more than an engineer's dream? In this context the robots almost appear as the red herring, and although the geminoid project is presented as robotics project to serve the wellbeing of people, one wonders what the true underlying research questions are that drive these investigations - is it to learn about human presence, in Japanese referred to as " sonzai-kan "?
This suggests that the real question to ask might be what we will choose to define as humanness in the future? Is it mere presence (which can be remote, virtual or actual), or is it rather that the systemic fabric that evolution has woven for, with and within humankind contrasts to the stuff of the robot's dream? This question, which Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zöller (2008) refer to as the "biology of love", is at the core of Mechanical Love , which hints at precisely this dimension of mutual care and respect. Phie Ambo rather elegantly succeeds in raising these issues without explicit commentary on the events. She does this through a very subtle, yet clearly defined, presence of her as interacting filmmaker and a sensitive use of visual language. What essentially can be defined as an ethical concern is affirmed through the audio-visual evocation of the symbolism of the bamboo at the beginning and the end of the film and explicitly expressed in the quotation from Eden Ahbez' famous 1947 song 'Nature Boy', which reconfirms that as ever so often, popular culture got there first: "The greatest things you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return".
References:
Maturana Romesin, H. and Verden-Zöller, G. 2008. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love . Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Taggart, W. et.al. 2005. 'An Interactive Robot in a Nursing Home: Preliminary Remarks'. Conference Paper presented at the Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science Workshop by the Cognitive Science Society. Online at: http://www.androidscience.com/proceedings2005/TaggartCogSci2005AS.pdf (consulted 26 May 2009).
Turkle, S. et.al. 2006. 'Relational Artifacts with Children and Elders: the Complexities of Cybercompanionship'. In Connection Science , 18 (4): 347-361. |
