RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A club in France wants to provide a different show for its customers. The SC-Club in Nantes is debuting two unusual pole dancers to celebrate its fifth anniversary. The new dancers are robots topped with a CCTV camera for a head.
“For us it’s like a little robotic wink. We need something human, warm, with physical contact, and this is actually a way of uniting opposites,” Laurent Roue, the club’s owner, told the publication.
About the possibility of these robots changing these type of shows, one of the dancers had no doubts. “They won’t change our sector. They won’t replace us. We’re not in a normal job. It’s artistic work. It’s something that’s beautiful and the robots won’t change that”, pointed out ‘Lexi’.
The move is an artistic one and the bots are created by British artist Giles Walker. Walker has overlaid the robots’ metal bodies with parts from plastic mannequins.
The camera for a head is meant to play with notions of voyeurism, posing the question of “who has the power between the voyeur and the observed person,” Walker told Sky News.
Club owner Laurent Roue made it clear that the robots are not a replacement for human employees. “For us, it’s a wink, a homage in a way to robotics,” he told Sky News.
“We need something human, warmth, physical contact, and this is really putting together opposites. To each his own.”
The robots will make their official debut this Tuesday and will be performing there for a month. The club is the first night club to have these special dancers.
Walker made the bots back in 2008. He explained to The Verge that, at the time, there was a lot of discussion in the news about the “sexed up” Iraq dossier.
“So I was just playing with the idea that if a document could be sexed up, maybe CCTV cameras could be as well,” said Walker. “That’s how I got to these mechanical peeping toms. It was a mingling of all those things.”