Convulsive Automation. Notes on the Resurgence of Surrealist Aesthetics Within Soft Robotics Article Swipe
The concept of “the uncanny” forms a link between Surrealism and the field of robotics. In this paper, however, I seek to construct a novel and different pathway of connections between surrealism and robotics that runs through the recently emerged subfield of soft robotics. Soft robotics designates a line of research intent on leveraging the functional benefits that come with constructing robots from pliable and elastic materials with mechanical properties similar to those of organic tissue. Soft robots often possess skin-like haptic qualities and highly biomorphic morphologies. They can deform, alter their shape, or even go shapeless and dynamically change back and forth from being hard to being soft – operations and procedures that figure prominently within surrealist visuality and the surrealist imaginary. Referencing selected works of surrealist art and surrealist theoretical writings and their art historical reception, the article presents an argument that a surrealist aesthetic reverberates throughout soft robotics. It seeks to elucidate how soft robotics activates categories and themes of surrealist art practice and to consider what explanatory force surrealist concepts and ideas, notably André Breton’s concept of “convulsive beauty”, might have for understanding and contextualizing soft robotics as an emergent cultural phenomenon. Are the apparent affinities between the two merely formal in character and a surface phenomenon or could they, to some extent, run deeper?
