ABSTRACT
This article explores the practices of making one specific robot, namely Armar III at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, through the lens of the queering witness.
Therefore, it develops a methodology of becoming such a queering witness in the context of contemporary German humanoid robotics. The focus is on tracing how entangled agencies, iterative productions and emerging subject–object relations unfold in the setting of Armar’s kitchen robotic laboratory – instead of researching pre-given id/entities with properties. Further, by grasping with the mapped set of practices through the notion of ‘performing the kitchen’, the article provides insights into the process of designing the humanlike robot in the context of the kitchen as a process of a co-constitution between robots and humans. Becoming a queering witness to the practices of performing the kitchen then means to identify the mostly unacknowledged forms of knowing and creating in this context – namely, situated, embodied and sensing forms. This also requires establishing a different understanding of interaction between human and machine. In this view, the subject no longer interacts with the machine by mastering it, but rather by entering a reciprocal relation in which the subject and object position are indeterminate and rather the result of relating. These insights into one robotic laboratory furthermore serve as an impulse for suggesting a rethink of the process of designing robots in terms of a multiomodal co-designing that cannot be cut off from the host of labours, spatio-temporal arrangements, and actors involved in such a making of robots.
