A Robot’s Dream

A Robot’s Dream invites visitors to witness the advent of humanoid robots in architecture. The immersive environment features a humanoid robot within curved walls made of robotically assembled rebar meshes. These intricate mesh walls function as a perceptual interface, alternately revealing and obscuring views, offering glimpses of a suspended humanoid robot. The rebar mesh acts as a visual filter, suggesting the simultaneous division, yet entanglement of humans and artificial beings.
Floating mid-air in a sleeping pose, the robot exists in a dream-like state, occasionally displaying delicate, anthropomorphic, alienating gestures—bodily expressions of a dream shifting between comfort and nightmare. Audio and visual cues and contextual photography, visitors witness the robot’s hallucinations—memories, aspirations, power, and anxieties about functioning in a world designed by and for humans. The installation invites both an empathetic reading, humanising the machine through its anthropomorphic form, and a critical reflection on robotic automation’s role in today’s society. It evokes considerations on what is gained and lost in terms of human agency, material craftsmanship, and interpersonal relationships when robotic animatronics integrate into our shared spaces and domains.