SIGNATORY ROBOTS
Emmanuel Mahé (research director), EnsAD, EnsadLab—
SACRe/le Laboratoire (EA 7410) Paris université (PSL),
France. Email: emmanuel.mahe@ensad.fr.
See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/54/3 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
Submitted: 19 December 2018
Seing is the medieval French term for various ways of mark-
ing, of signing with a symbol to authenticate deeds or certifi-
cates: the ancestor of the term signature. From the Latin
signum, it is now developing a new dimension in our digital
society with electronic signatures, and more especially when
inscribed by a robot.
A robot, replacing the president of the Ecole Polytechnique
in France, recently signed the founding convention uniting the
partners of an education and research program supported by
EnsAD (the French national art and design school), Fondation
Daniel & Nina Carasso and Polytechnique. That legal-robotic
performance, entitled SEING Performance (Fig. 1), raises a
number of questions: technical, legal, anthropological, philo-
sophical.
I designed that performance, the first step in a multidiscipli-
nary research project bringing together legal experts, design-
ers, engineers and researchers in the social sciences and
engineering.
The question of robot signatures is the theme uniting this
research. To summarize, three principles guide the research
on “signatory robots”: The first principle concerns forms of
visibility (the design of the signature: the drawing and the
gesture, its conception and realization, the differentiated
reproducibility); the second focuses on analyzing and test-
ing/experimenting with the forms of the terms/wording (signa-
tory, legal foundation, contracts, laws, conventions); and the
third principle, which in a way results from the interaction of
the first two, focuses around the processes of subjectivation at
work (subject, sociality, rituality). The robot as signatory is
thus an opportunity to observe not only how these interactions
are established and how the connections create new subjects
(in the “human” sense) but also unforeseen situations, new
ways of creating subjects.
The signature in all its forms—delegated, simulated, autono-
mous—is examined from multiple angles in the article. From
the history of delegation devices (from Jefferson to Obama) to
artistic experiments, and up to their current most unexpected
developments, these various perspectives make it possible to
question contemporary issues related to today’s dispositifs.
These machines invent, reproduce themselves and make mis-
takes, the better to learn—according to the models of creative
machines, deep learning and persuasive design—and also or-
ganize themselves into networks to collaborate, calculate, act
upon the world, with humans and among themselves: autono-
mous cars, AI judges or doctors, blockchain smart contracts,
high-frequency trading, ambient interfaces.
My supplemental article is therefore an account of that first
performance as well as an opening onto perspectives for multi-
disciplinary research: It is a sort of brief manifesto.
Note
This English-language extended abstract is based on Emmanuel Mahé, Les ro-
bots signataires: Processus de subjectivation robotique, which is available as
an online supplement.
Fig. 1. SEING Performance, view of robot, pen and table, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris (EnsAD—PSL Paris université).
(© Emmanuel Mahé. Photo © École Polytechnique—J. Barande.)
©2021 ISAST. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.
https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02032
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