A critical and re-configured HRI might look to the arts, where another history of robots has been unfolding since the Czech artist Karel Capek's critical robotic labor parable of 1921, in which the word robot was coined in its modern usage. This paper explores several vectors by which artist-created robots, both physical and imaginary, have offered pronounced contrasts to robots-as-usual, and offers directions as to how these more emancipated cousins might be useful to the field of HRI.