Coy-B, an Art Robot for Exploring the Ontology of Artificial Creatures

The author is a performance and visual artist whose interest lies in the co-evolution of humans and machines, a subject he explores with self-made machines. The paper describes the aims, method, and context of Coy-B, a robot designed for a performance art experiment in human-robot interaction loosely based on Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) where the German artist shared a gallery space in New York for several days with a wild coyote (Fig 1). Coy-B will feature in a series of durational performances for an autonomous mobile robot and a human, where the robot will take the role occupied by the coyote in Beuys’ piece. Diametrically opposed to the coyote who symbolised a natural instinctual dimension, the Coy-B robot is a representative of contemporary techno-scientific achievements, a fully artificial creature.