15. Rouge and Robot: The Disruptive Feminine

In future worlds, robots will participate and collaborate in human activities, and deeply interact with humans through personal, intimate and immediate actions around and even on the human body. Taking feminine rituals of grooming the body and highlighting body attributes as a focus, we investigate the intersection of biological and machine moving bodies, exploring vulnerable moments of touch. Introducing a robot into an entrenched cultural act that references the universal female is a disruptive, critical tactic for rethinking dominant approaches to human–robot collaboration. Through a Deleuzian analysis of our video artwork code_red (2021), we propose an alternative theoretical interpretation of the interaction between an industrial robotic arm and a female figure. We then turn to a broader consideration of how this particular analysis ties back into current thinking in collaborative, industrial and social robotics, through a discussion of concepts of breaching the intimate zone, resonance, and micro-gestures in human–robot relations.