If you’ve been on the internet recently you might have come across the above tweet, showing a robot with a CCTV camera for a head doing some half-hearted pole-dancing. It’s a good tweet! It captures a bunch of extremely 2017 feelings, including dystopia, fear of job automation, and the general mood of absurdity that’s going around a lot. Plus, you know, it’s a pole-dancing robot.
But, as a famous philosopher once asked: why is this robot pole dancing? To what end? Well it turns out it’s art, but there’s a bit more to it than that.
At the time [when I made them], they were putting CCTV cameras up all around London, and Britain was becoming the most surveilled society in the world. So I was playing with this idea of voyeurism, and who has the power in that relationship; whether it’s the voyeur or the person being watched.”
— Giles Walker
“At the time [when I made them], they were putting CCTV cameras up all around London, and Britain was becoming the most surveilled society in the world,” says Walker. “So I was playing with this idea of voyeurism, and who has the power in that relationship; whether it’s the voyeur or the person being watched.”
He adds that there was a lot of discussion in the news at the time about the “sexed up” Iraq dossier — a document published by the British government examining the existence of WMDs in Iraq, which a source later said had been exaggerated. “So I was just playing with the idea that if a document could be sexed up, maybe CCTV cameras could be as well,” says Walker. “That’s how I got to these mechanical peeping toms. It was a mingling of all those things.”
Since their creation, the robots have taken on a life of their own. Pictures and videos of them resurface online every now and again, and Walker hires them out to tech conferences, festivals, and other events. (They cost around £1,000 a day or $1,343.) And although they look straight out of a sci-fi B-movie, the bots aren’t technologically complex. They’re made from shop mannequins and are powered by windscreen wiper motors, with their movements controlled by short, pre-defined loops. “At that time I built all my stuff out of scrap and found objects,” says Walker. “So not much tech in there. It’s really old school.”