- Theory is when you think you know something but it doesn’t work.
- Practice is when something works but you don’t know why.
- Usually we combine theory and practice: nothing works and we don’t know why!
Research interests:
Creative Robotics, Social Robotics, Cultural Robotics, Service Robotics, Human – Robot Interaction, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, AI for Robotics, Machine Learning.
Overview:
I treat the robots I work with, whether built from scratch or brought in as available platforms and reworked, reprogrammed and repurposed, not as finished pieces of engineering but as open questions: what does it mean for a body, however artificial, to move, express and relate within human life? For me, robotics is inseparable from questions long asked by philosophy and art: what constitutes agency, where the boundary between subject and object actually lies, and what forms of kinship, discomfort or wonder emerge when non-human things start to behave as though they have a will of their own. Drawing on posthumanist thought, which decentres the human as the sole measure of intelligence and agency, and on animist traditions that have long granted spirit and presence to objects, tools and machines, I ask what a genuinely relational robotics could look like, one that neither reduces the robot to a servant nor mistakes it for a person. This question of relationship sits at the root of my work on human robot relationships, an enquiry I first opened under the name Lovotics, exploring what it might mean for a robot to be trusted, missed, cared for or even loved, and for that affection to be returned in some artificial but meaningful form.
Creative Robotics is where this thinking now lives most fully, and I hold it as a genuinely open field rather than a fixed set of outputs. With students and collaborators, I work on robots for theatre and live performance, robots that paint and draw, robots that write and deliver comedy, robots that move through choreography and dance, robots that make and respond to sound and music, and robotic works shown as sculpture and installation in gallery and exhibition settings. Within this same creative practice sit the questions I have long asked under Social Robotics and Cultural Robotics: how a robot earns trust, expresses itself and cares for the people around it, and how it carries, resists or reinvents the values, aesthetics and traditions of the communities it moves through. These are not separate concerns running alongside the creative work, they are part of what makes it creative in the first place, since every performance, exhibition or public encounter is also a social and cultural event, read and reinterpreted differently wherever it takes place.
The process matters as much as the outcome, or even more. Much of this research lives in workshops, rehearsals, iterative prototyping, failed attempts and open ended making, carried out with research students, across international collaborations, and often in dialogue with wider communities and audiences who encounter these robots on stage, in galleries, in clinics or in public space. Their responses, hesitations and unexpected readings become part of the research itself, not simply feedback on a finished product.
What links this research across its many forms, laboratory prototypes, staged performances, therapeutic and service applications, is a refusal to treat robotics as a settled or purely technical field. Every robot I work with, alongside my students and collaborators, is offered as a small argument about what artificial life might yet become, and an invitation to keep asking, rigorously and often playfully, what it means to share the world with things we have made, or remade, in our own uncertain image.
Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@hoomansamani
Publications:
Hooman Samani 