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Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

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Ecomorphs

Ecomorphs

In the forest, there is an expedition without a specified route. In between the trees and the subtle moss you can find mysterious glowing soft creatures. They are lively and enthusiastic, but also fragile. So they wish to be taken good care of. Audiences may slowly approach the inconspicuous corner of their existence, experiencing the uncanny and charming ambience. There will be communication between living beings, something innocent and within reach. Noiseless and intangible.

Ecomorphs is an outdoor interactive installation made up of soft robots that are sensitive to their surrounding environment. The team modified 3D printer mechanisms to solder sheets of TPU sheets together into bespoke shapes that define the appearance and embodied performance of the soft robots. The installation utilises a variety of integrated sensing approaches that regulate air pressure inside the robot, detect human gestures, human visual attention, and observers movement around the work. This data is combined to choreograph the motion of the robots mysteriously living deep in a dark forest.

References

  1. Ashby, W. R., 1956. AN INTRODUCTION TO CYBERNETICS. London: Chapman & Hall,.
  2. Bohme, G., 2018. Atmosphere as a fundamental concept of a new aesthetics. In: J. Thibaud, ed.
  3. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. s.l.:Routledge, pp. 113-126.
  4. Bishop, C., 2005. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate and Routledge.
  5. Glynn, R., 2007. Performative Ecologies. [Art] (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL).
  6. Graaf, M. M. A. d. & Allouch, S. B., 2017. The Influence of Prior Expectations of a Robot’s Lifelikeness on Users’ Intentions to Treat a Zoomorphic Robot as a Companion. Int J of Soc Robotics, Issue 9, pp. 17-32.
  7. Romano, D., Donati, E., Benelli, G. & Stefanini, C., 2019. A review on animal–robot interaction: from bio-hybrid organisms to mixed societies. Biological Cybernetics, Volume 113, pp. 201-225.