TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Soft robotics is an emerging and innovative technological practice that involves making robotic parts out of pneumatically powered silicone appendages that can grip objects or move autonomously when inflated. Soft robots are created by designing 3D models that contain air chambers in their central structure and can be turned into a 2 part mold. Once 3D printed, the mold is casted in silicone and the parts are bonded together with silicone adhesive. Because silicone is such an expensive and non ecologically friendly material, I am experimenting with various bio silicone recipes that use ingredients like glycerol, gelatine, agar agar, K carrageenan and water which are affordable and biodegradable to find a formula that is best suited for soft robotics. 

In the past my arts practice has involved using body casting to make wax multiples  of ears and other appendages such as hands, thumbs, noses, lips, vulva, chicken feet and mushrooms. The intended outcome being to form amorphous organic entities that are novel, unexpected and uncanny. My current arts practice involves making many multiples of soft robots that form an amorphous whole as they all inflate and deflate at differing time intervals, playing upon notions of biomimicry in robotics to generate life like automatons that simulate fungal, botanical and oceanic figures while refusing to perform any functional task for humans. 

I propose to further push the concept of biomimicry to make soft robots whose primary structural  forms are created from casts made of human body parts and other organic material such as fungi and plant matter or organs such as cow hearts or octopus tentacles sourced from local butcher shops and fisheries. The goal being to explore how soft robotics as an arts practice can be pursued in imaginative and sustainable ways by leaning farther into the concept of biomimicry that it is based upon and further looking to the natural world for inspiration in their construction.

The conceptual intention of the experimentations draw on psychoanalytic notions about fascist culture formulated by Klaus Theweleit in “Male Fantasies: Volume II.” In this text Theweleit deconstructs the doctrine of the fascist psyche which clings to the rigidity and sterility of martial hierarchy and resentfully rejects the viscous fluidity of desire which is associated with both their internal organs and the seething public masses that comprise crowds found at protest demonstrations. I am interested in combining soft robotics, body casting and bio-silicone to create an artistic representation of what Theweleit describes as the “animal” in the mass which “snaps its greedy jaw and stares poisonously, paralyzing from a thousand eyes. It has a thousand legs, a thousand heads, it can generate a thousand degrees of heat. It can metamorphose into a single creature, many-limbed millipede, rat, snake or dragon.” The philosophy and methodology of my practice is further guided by theoretical frameworks found in disciplines such as cyberfeminism and tactical media, to create a work which stands in opposition to and challenges both the cisgender binary and institutional approaches to electronic arts.