Becoming Cyborg: Corporeal Empathy, Agency and Politics of Participation in Robot Performance

Cyborg bodies enable heightened perception of movement, and create expanded opportunities for movement and sense perceptory experiences that allow for new kinds of empathic experiences. Learning to move as cyborgs requires both the ability to coordinate physical actions and to cultivate an awareness of how we encounter ourselves as movers while incorporating foreign bodies/appendages with our own moving bodies. Understanding how perception and action are linked in performance contexts can lead to a nuanced understanding of real-time coordination and improvisation of cyborg bodies in non-performance settings. This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of interaction with exoskeletons in a participatory dance performance. Through an ethnographic understanding, the paper considers how joint action control in participatory performances with exoskeletons creates instances of shared or hybrid agency, creating new possibilities for what Karen Barad calls “intra-action.” Human bodies and machines moving together onstage raise questions concerning disablement, cyborg-ableism, and transhumanism.