Keiichiro Shibuya (front) performing at Palais de Tokyo in Paris on February 28 with Kouka-roid robot. © Makery
Kouka-roid is the latest anthropomorphic robot prototype created by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. Following her droid poetry performance, she is currently showing at “Le Bord des mondes” exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
She is already in place, ever so slightly moving her head, naturally, listening to sound tests by the musician who will later make her recite Boris Vian. Kouka-roid is one of the sensations of “Le Bord des mondes” exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, presented alongside the cloned android of its genitor, Japanese robotics expert Hiroshi Ishiguro, from the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University.
Kouka-roid is not human but android, or more specifically, “geminoid”—term invented by Ishiguro to describe one of these robots that imitates human appearance and behavior in every way. Her physical and gestural verisimilitude, modeled on a typical young Japanese woman, troubles and fascinates visitors who walk around her, want to touch her, take her photo without even considering a selfie. Reminiscent of the Swedish TV series Real Humans, February 28 was “Human too human” day at Palais de Tokyo.
Perfect model
After she posed as the perfect model (no shame in letting her play the role of the beautiful silent hostess) during Professor Ishiguro’s lecture, which attempted to answer the (vast) question “What is being human?”, she is a bit less realistic when performing to the distorted sounds of musician Keiichiro Shibuya (author of the opera for avatars The End). She mumbles vague phrases quoted from Boris Vian, but anyone who is used to hearing modified Vocoder-like samples of the human voice will find that her false playback, where it’s impossible to recognize a word of Vian (Lost in translation?), underlines the trouble—this machine may well imitate the human type, but she is quite gauche…
Excerpt of performance by Keiichiro Shibuya with Kouka-roid, Palais de Tokyo, 28 February 2015 :
That said, the latest proto-roid to come out of the Japanese robotics lab is less skilled than other biped robots. Ishiguro is more interested in our (human) relationship to them. He takes his clone (much more perfected than Kouka) along with him everywhere, exhibits in both Japan and Paris and continues to give lectures around the world, to question humans through these machines that resemble us…
What is human nature ? Kouka and her kind will soon be useful to a lot of people, Ishiguro promises, and not necessarily the ones we may think of first. He is talking about the elderly and disabled who may need help—in Japan, certainly, he predicts, as it is both the birthplace of anthropomorphic robotics and home to one of the most visibly ageing populations. Ishiguro shows off one of his greatest media and economic successes: an android mannequin feebly waving in a storefront window that fascinated shoppers. Not very glamorous, this use of robots as street touts…
Ishiguro’s geminoids have limited cognitive abilities—Kouka doesn’t even know how to walk. Her artificial intelligence is purposely bridled by her genitor, who prefers to chop up his research in artificial intelligence by type of machine. He uses soft forms evoking a large pillow or a shapeless down comforter to reproduce typical human behaviors such as curling up, stretching out, rubbing one’s eyes… Each one of his robots allows him to analyze human psychology or sociability.
Ishiguro tries to convince us that soon, “we will prefer to interact with pleasant and regulated robots instead of asking a salesperson for information”… In short, Ishiguro as the scientist in the museum is most interested in what makes humans human. He has no fear that one day robots will overtake their masters (see the predictions by Stephen Hawking or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk). For now, Kouka-roid is pretty tame…
“Le Bord des mondes” exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until March 17 2015