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posted by takyon on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-our-poles dept.

The Sapphire Gentleman's Club has rented an artist's robot strippers to draw some of the attention and press surrounding the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

The robots were as advertised: They gyrated on a stripper pole to music from 50 Cent and Pharrell, with dollar bills scattered on the stage and the floor. A half-dozen human dancers, most of whom were dressed in tight, shiny robot costumes, repeatedly took pics in front of their metallic colleagues. (The woman greeting guests as I walked in told me that I missed a skit where the human dancers unveiled the robot dancers to "Star Wars" music, and then joked about them stealing their jobs.)

The robots look nothing like actual humans, thank God. They had CCTV security cameras for faces, and you could see their metal interiors and wires as they moved up and down the pole. (They were, however, wearing high heels.)

And unlike many of the big tech gimmicks you'll hear about this week from CES, the robot pole-dancers aren't courtesy of a massive multi-billion dollar corporation. They're the work of an artist named Giles Walker, a 50-year-old Brit who describes himself as a scrap metal artist with a passion for building animatronic robots. One of his other projects, The Last Supper, features 13 robots interacting around a table.

Walker says he got the idea for pole-dancing robots more than seven years ago, when he noticed the rise of CCTV cameras being used as a way to surveil people in Britain for safety purposes, what he called "mechanical Peeping Toms." He was inspired by the idea of voyeurism, or watching others for pleasure, and decided to try and turn the cameras into something sexy on their own.

Walker goes on to express concerns about the eventual rise of sex robots, and describes himself as a "robot pimp".

Video (1m0s).

Also at CNBC and Vice.

Source: [H]ardOCP: Robot Strippers Return at CES 2018 (Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard)


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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:47PM (#621156)

    You "expect"?

    I get that it's an improvement when the bunch of dudes that get to be part of the discussion (i.e. the popular kids in adulthood) take an interest in sexism. But you know who else paid lip service to ending sexism? Harvey Weinstein and the rest of the "creative class" [zcomm.org]. Their advocacy has clearly done a lot to advance the cause</sarcasm>.

    How about we get some actual women to opine on whether they were offended? Otherwise, we risk changing society to fix the sexism you perceive without necessarily doing a single damn thing to fix the sexism anybody actually experiences.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:06AM (#621229)

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/09/case-j09.html [wsws.org]

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/10/lemo-j10.html [wsws.org]

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/11/duto-j11.html [wsws.org]

    Many women see the dangerous precedent it may set but are scared of publicly opposing #MeToo.

    This "kinematic sculpture" was exactly what certain powerful people needed to pour some gas on the fire.