concept

A robot with no obvious utility, RoboThespian™ cannot vacuum the floor, it does not have the precision to assemble cars or televisions and it lacks the mobility to deliver mail.
So what is it for? It speaks of everything yet is for nothing.
As an actor, it is a mirror. The most difficult question you may have to answer yourself is: 'what am I for?' RoboThespian™ demonstrates that utility is not a prerequisite for existence, a concept familiar to the artist but alien to the engineer. 'Necessity is the mother of invention', a received wisdom, but necessity is not the mother of this invention, I doubt they are even related at all.
RoboThespian™ taunts us with childish jibes. Can a human be insulted by a machine? It howls in agony and laments about its lonely, loveless existence. Can we empathise with it? It sings, it performs. Are we entertained by it?
These are simple questions to answer. We embrace the willing suspension of disbelief. Flicking patches of light on an LCD screen are not pixels to us, they are recreations of life. We accept the stories they tell without much thought for the media they are carried by.
In this sense RoboThespian™ is a medium like theatre, but more akin to cinema and television. It automates and removes actual human interaction and replaces it with a mechanical analogue of humanity.
Modern life is defined by humanity's love hate relationship with its technological creations. It's in our nature to see life, personality and intention where none exists. I curse my computer when its software crashes, and thump my radio as it drifts off tune. These devices are not sorry for what they've done, they feel no pain. Yet I can't help feeling that they do. RoboThespian™ exploits the human desire to see life everywhere, it is an anthropomorphic machine, a dot on the graph that starts with automata, and will end when we are no longer able to distinguish the living from the mechanised.
Is RoboThespian™a glimpse of a forthcoming technological utopia, or a dire warning of what may come to be. It is trivial, yet it touches on some profound questions that confront us all. At the very least it's entertaining.