ROSIE, ELIZA, CHLOE, RUBY
2018, HD single channel video, 8min 11sec
Observing the global phenomenon that smart home appliances are female gendered with their female names, ROSIE, ELIZA, CHLOE, RUBY(2018) introduces four female home appliance robots named from the 1990s to recent times ¾ Rosie, the home robot in <The Jetsons>, the American cartoon aired in the early 1990s. Eliza, the first psychological counseling computer developed at MIT in 1964. Cloi/Chloe, the serving robot released by LG in 2016. And Ruby, a robot vacuum cleaner purchased by an anonymous buyer from the Amazon online mall in 2018. The narration overlaps with the first-person perspective of a robot vacuum cleaner that wanders around the house endlessly. Traditional gender roles of housework and emotional labor are reproduced with the development of technology. The viewer's gaze is invited to the perspective and movement of the insensibly floating machine. Will the capitalist desires, emotions, and languages surrounding the relationship between these female robots and female consumers further strengthen or blur the previous dichotomy of subject-object, human-non-human?
