Anthropomorphic Machine
In Collaboration with STELARC

The Anthropomorphic Machine is an interactive and performative robotic installation. It is engineered with pneumatically actuated rubber muscles, steel tendons, a deformable tensegrity skeletal structure, a circulatory system of compressed air, and a vision and computational system. It is a synthetic organisation allowing an emergence of form through an open system of collective behaviours, including local and remote human presence and actions. When under the tensegrity canopy, the vision system detects density, distribution and dynamics of people beneath the tensegrity canopy, and the Anthropomorphic Machine responds with either undulating, swaying, pulsing or glitchy behaviour, generating a vocabulary of machine aliveness. Anyone, from anywhere, at any time can interact online, viewing their choreography via the multicamera live streaming.  The Anthropomorphic Machine is not only a visual structure but also a sound machine. The choreography that is generated by its interaction composes the compressed air sounds and solenoid clicks, immersing the audience in its acoustical landscape.

This project builds on Stelarc's fascination with the body and the potential to disassociate its functions. In collaboration with Power to Make, the project explores a machine body as an organisation of parts that has the potential to self-regulate, through its robot vision and deformable structure. The project proposes an alternative anatomical architecture and interrogates what it means for architecture to be a self-regulated system – a body without organs.