Made to Fail: Chaosmo-Technics of Japan’s Robot Theater

Abstract

By attending to the disorganization, this article theorizes the entanglement of the technological disorder and the cosmological chaos from the case study of Japan’s Robot Theater Project (2008 to present), which stages the near-future human-robot cohabitation using social robots. Centered on the performativity of disorder, contingency, and dysfunction enacted by the robots, I examine how the Zen-Buddhist-inspired thinking of the chaos and the void is incorporated into prototyping dysfunctional social robots. I coin the term ‘chaosmo-technics’ as a conceptual tool to investigate the counter-performance of defective technology, decoding how prototyping technological disorder is situated in Japanese cosmological thinking and the disaster fallouts of the post-Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. The article’s approach to disorganization via the lenses of chaosmo-technics aims to examine the limitations of the technological organization, unveiling its relations to other alien forms of (dis)organization in the names of error, chaos, nullification, uncontrollability, and catastrophe in the context of Japan’s robot theater.