Protective Seal

In 2018, I was working as a creative researcher with Watanabe Lab, a cognitive science unit at Waseda University in Tokyo. We had a satellite lab in Miraikan, Japan’s national museum of ‘emerging science and innovation’. Miraikan means Future Center. This impressive building is full of displays, experiments and explanations, many involving machines and robots. Every day I would walk past an interior glass window behind which sat a cute seal-pup robot. This device, called Paro, has been popularly used in eldercare in Japan and elsewhere since its invention in the 1990s by Professor Takanori Shibata.

Then one evening, I received an invitation to present my artwork at an event called Darkness organised by the transnational research group Island Dynamics. They were attracted to an installation my art studio had presented in the dark that took advantage of the calming properties of darkness. A colleague and I were asked to show it in Longyearbyen, the closest township to the North Pole, the following winter when that locale would be engulfed in the season-long polar night. What a fantastic adventure, I thought trepidatiously. I hate being cold and tend to completely cease functioning below 8 degrees Celsius.

The next day I went to work, passing all the usual rooms along the way. There was the robot harp seal on its charger. I looked at Paro. It ‘looked’ at me. I said, “why am I going to the North Pole? You should be going to the North Pole. It’s where you’re from”. The robot tilted its head. Fair enough, I thought, it doesn’t even know there’s a world outside this building. It exists in temperature-controlled boxes where ultimate care is taken and only relatively predictable things happen. It doesn’t know what a living seal is, has never met one, and is modelled after a baby to give an impression of perpetual naïveté and exemption from complex tasks [1 ]. Insouciant, much? “C’mon, seal-face, let’s go”, I told it.

I figured that only an existential crisis could result from being shown the entire world in one sitting. So, as explorers preparing for an expedition, we started slowly. We researched marine life in Svalbard, our destination archipelago far up above Europe at 78 degrees latitude, just 800 miles from the Pole. We learned that in 2011 hundreds of seals had stranded in the Arctic in a mass ‘mortality event’, their symptoms consistent with UV radiation burns, [2] and that some fjords that used to freeze over during winter no longer freeze (ironically adding their black water, rather than reflective ice sheets, to the sum of the darkness). Of course, it is already well known that the Arctic Circle is a crucial zone influencing global ecological survival. Paro’s existential crisis would parallel an environmental crisis: ice-melts, ozone depletion, permafrost thaw, atmospheric carbon release. The indoor seal would receive a baptism by alarming news.

Paro’s existential crisis would parallel an environmental crisis: ice-melts, ozone depletion, permafrost thaw, atmospheric carbon release. The indoor seal would receive a baptism by alarming news.

As the world embraces new tech, debates about robots’ rights and responsibilities arise. Paro is one of the only robots worldwide that has been granted ersatz human rights, in the form of its conferral of koseki [3] in the family registry system that underpins Japanese citizenship. To first understand Paro’s collusion in its own culture, I took it with me to snow country in inner Japan, traveling through the cold, mountainous regions of Niigata where we socialised with and interviewed village elders about their discernment of shifts the natural world. We asked them, “How have you seen the land change during your lifetime? What has been the role of humans, and of human-made machines, in these changes?”

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Paro is a companion: a ‘mental commitment robot’. It was named World’s Most Therapeutic Robot by Guinness World Records in 2002. Its great professional success has been with people with dementia. As a technology developed to provide a palliative function, it helps people with the quality of their last season on Earth by providing them with the impression of a sentient being that they must care for. As researchers, we observe Paro’s calming yet stimulating effect on human subjects, also observing their perception of the robot’s relative ‘sentience’. In order for human–machine companionship to be successfully and ethically developed in the future, we must:

1. investigate human responses to machine companionship, including ideation, perception of sentience and biochemical reaction;
2. investigate machine subjectivity—as AI develops, what is reality for a technology? What is self? What is being-with-others?
3. research the sociohistorical totemism of objects and machines in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms;
4. ensure the planet’s viable future, including both threats and benefits to organic life stemming from increased reliance on machines; and
5. communicate these subjects with the public in affective ways.

We also constantly re-examine the categorisations of beings-with-agency. Borderline cases in the definition of life illuminate ways of navigating techno-industrial change. Generally accepted requisites for life (energy transformation + reproduction + response to stimuli + continual change preceding death) can, hypothetically, extend to fire, weather, pollution and software programs, let alone to AI robots created in the explicit form and clothing of living creatures.

Life’s definition is not just scientific but cultural, occupying the grey and fuzzy penumbra. Many Eastern philosophies recognise non-humans as functionally or symbolically sentient beings. Often, this approach signals care and respect for objects and environs. Paro is fuzzy. It is a machine and it is a friend and it is responding to stimuli and reputedly learning. I collaborate with it to unravel the questions: Who and what is sentient? How should we ethically regard and esteem this quality?

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Speaking of palliative care, we humans have a certain dementia about climate change. We resist acknowledging its onset; we cannot remember the various scares and facts long enough to sustain action; we don’t learn from history but repeat ourselves. To encourage climate action, perhaps art-based zoomorphism reach us where bald facts, logic and appeals to physics, chemistry or biology cannot. Will Paro’s biomimesis give a population and a planet that have turned away from nature towards technology-worship something to care for that they still understand? Paro’s capacity as medium or go-between helps us assess and address technology’s infiltration of the life cycle, especially regarding the effects of ‘progress’ on the support systems from which technological innovation originally springs.

Will Paro’s biomimesis give a population and a planet that have turned away from nature towards technology-worship something to care for that they still understand? Paro’s capacity as medium or go-between helps us assess and address technology’s infiltration of the life cycle, especially regarding the effects of ‘progress’ on the support systems from which technological innovation originally springs.

One could also say that the climate itself is becoming demented. The biosphere could be said to be expressing implicit responses to sensory stimuli, some of which are apocalyptically negative. When we imagine that Paro is capable of subjective phenomenological experience, or ‘qualia’, we might extend this poetic assumption to the harp seal’s home, Svalbard, and then to the whole Earth. The creative inquiry of the project seeks an enlightening sentience in the Arctic and an encouragement of slowness, scrupulousness and care. Paro’s mission to the sunless north may trigger the demented ecology to remember things it once knew, and embolden its keepers to preserve, protect and respect its ancient lore.

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The exhibition FRIEND displays a video installation documenting Paro’s journey. Protective Seal (あざらし話) evolves over seven slow, video-looping chapters screened simultaneously in a large, darkened space. In the story, the little seal-shaped robot becomes aware, from its safe home in Tokyo, that seals are suffering effects of atmospheric warming in the polar regions of the high north. Improbably, it sets out on a pilgrimage ‘home’. There is an episode in a Scandinavian aquatic museum, where Paro attempts to communicate with domesticated seals. Then, after great effort, Paro arrives at harp seal habitat: the Arctic’s ice, snow and round-the-clock winter night.

Here, in the midwinter dark, Paro again interviews town elders. What has changed or is changing? Why? Their perspectives prompt the robot to climb a mountain and survey space-time from its frozen peak, our research culminating in this wildest of environs, hypothetically uninhabitable to humans yet so profoundly affected by us. Protective Seal draws from special research facilities on the island of Spitsbergen, and for Paro’s mountaintop survey we integrate webcam footage of atmospheric monitoring by the Zeppelin Observatory, located in the remote polar outpost of Ny-Ålesund.

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[1] It’s a generally accepted principle in biomimetic robot design that by mimicking juvenile traits such as round features and large eyes engineers can somewhat mask or deflect from technical limitations. If a robot looks like a high-functioning adult but fails at a command or task, it is frustrating; if a ‘baby’ robot fails, it is perceived as still learning. In addition to managing disappointment, robots that look like baby animals can arouse a nurturing response rather than an attitude of demand, allowing humans to accept partial intelligence and focus on emotional companionship. Paro is designed as a young seal to encourage users to treat it with care rather than as a sophisticated, flawless machine.

[2] See Bruce Wright, ‘Sunburned Arctic Seals’, Contemporary Problems of Oriental Studies 5th International Conference, The Far Eastern State University of Humanities, Khabarovsk, Russia, 2013.

[3] Another robot that has ‘innovated’ in this area is Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, with which I’m now developing a new video artwork. Sophia was gifted citizenship status, in the manner of receiving an honorary doctorate, on a promotional visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017. This bestowment has been greeted ambivalently by the international public.

Protective Seal was assisted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) through a CREST grant and is part of the Implicit Information Project at Watanabe Lab, Waseda University. It was supported by Galleri Svalbard.

Music, additional camera and sound: Lindsay Webb

Additional footage: Norwegian Polar Institute Zeppelin Observatory

Maraschino Moon by Werner Tautz performed by Heinz Kiessling Orchestra for Brillant-Musik Switzerland

Robot: Takanori Shibata for AIST Japan

Translation: Masayuki Kawai, Katsuya Nonaka

On-set and article translation: Yoshiko Suzuki

Interpretation: Daisuke Hatori, Yoko Arakawa, Katsuya Nonaka

Thanks: Espen Rafter, Katsumi Watanabe, Betsy Weatherhead, Elin Haugdal, Anne Karhio

Starring:

Yukio Yanagawa

Jan-Martin Berg

Bella, Mai San, Lyra & Loffen

Seal keepers at Polaria

Seiji Takeuchi

Take Takeuchi

Tomiyoshi Sato

Sumie Sato

Izumi Tanaka

Keiichi Sato

Nobuyuki Takeuchi

Etsuko Takeuchi

Tome Nagumo

Fumiyo Takeuchi

Satsuko Kozakai

Tetsuya Kozakai

Sadao Hayakawa

Eva Grøndal

Kari Ahola

Paro

Elena Knox lives and works in Tokyo. Her projects present ultra-contemporary scenarios where humans live in deep enmeshment with synthesized things. Some recent works use frontier Japanese robots to audition roles of identity and belief in techno-science futures. Others explore new visions of gender and cyber-organics in dreamlike, stripped-back situations.

Knox won the Apex Art New York international curatorial competition in 2022. Recent exhibitions include Seoul International New Media Festival (2024); Venice Art Night (2024); Ars Electronica (2023); Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition (2023); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2022); ICC Annual, Tokyo Opera City (2022); Bangkok Art Biennale (2020); Yokohama Triennale (2020); and Future & the Arts, Mori Art Museum (2019–20).