Presentation of the residency Cyber-species Proximity by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May

- Can you introduce yourself?

We are Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, two artists that work both individually and collaboratively.  We come together to create robotic artworks that performatively explore our relationships to new technologies, from HARR1, our constantly moving humanoid robot which exhibits boredom, to our Antisocial Swarm Robots which make explicit our audiences desire to project life-like behaviour on to robots and inability to deconstruct even the simplest algorithms.

- Can you present your project “Cyber-species Proximity”?

We are going to develop our explorations of robotic movement through collaboration with the Human Robot Co-Mobility project at Schindler to investigate what our future co-existence with intelligent embodied robots might be, based on a deep investigation of human and robot interaction and movement, focusing on proximity, touch, body language and interactivity with socially-aware robots.

Our aim is to create a new human-robot performance experience/installation inspired by Schindler’s elevator service companion prototype and their elevator installation robot. The artwork will also explore the notion of the elevator itself as a performative (confined and time-limited) space of human-robot interaction and co-mobility.

- What do you expect from this residency?

The residency will give us the time and space to explore how humans and robots will co-exist in the future. Schindler (who are a leading elevator company) are incorporating blue-sky thinking in their work which makes perfect sense when you realise the invention of the elevator enabled the building of sky scrapers and changed the face of the cities we live in. We expect to be taken out of our comfort zones as we have already donned hard-hats and steel toe boots to visit a huge construction site and learn first-hand what the company do.