Shybot (2021),
Artist Statement
I created Shybot as an attempt to give emotion to a lifeless being. In this endeavor, I avoided simply creating a being who could either be happy, sad, or angry, and instead worked to capture a more tertiary emotion: Social Anxiety.
When activated, Shybot hurriedly seeks out the darkest area in a room. Anything under a certain threshold (Varying from sunlight to indoor lighting) causes Shybot to flee to darker spaces. Essentially, my robot seeks to “hide.” As I demonstrated Shybot’s routines to peers, I noticed a commonality between how people would refer to Shybot. As soon as he began moving, Shybot’s viewers language would shift from referring to Shybot as an “it” to a “him.”
This completely fascinated me. The only personifying features of the robot are an 8x8 LED matrix which displays a very pixelated face, and the routines which control his movement. Shybot, nonetheless, caused people to empathize with his eternal struggle to hide from sight, which, I realized after the fact, is more personifying (and endearing) than any facsimile to humanity.