01 Figures of Life

How “liveliness” is staged in robotic bodies, from micro-gestures and responsive behaviors to choreographed environments that seem to watch, wait, and adapt.​

This theme asks what, exactly, we are responding to when we say a machine feels animated, present, or somehow “alive.”

02 Autonomy & Authorship

As systems learn, optimize, and act with increasing independence, questions of authorship and responsibility move from fine print into the core of artistic and institutional practice.​

Here, autonomy is treated not just as a technical property but as a condition that reshapes legal, creative, and ethical claims around work made with and by machines.​

03 Embodiment & Expression

Robotic forms become tools for exploring identity, intimacy, and power—who serves, who performs, who is protected, and who is exposed in a machine-mediated world.​

This theme looks at how artists and designers use hardware, motion, and interface to encode social roles and emotional registers into machines.

04 Institutional Stewardship

Museums and collections must now care for works that move, update, network, and sometimes break in ways no static object ever could.​

The focus is on emerging models of conservation, display, and governance capable of holding entangled systems rather than bounded artifacts.​

05 Desire & Myth

The living automaton concentrates fantasies about perfect labor, perfect companionship, and perfect control, alongside anxieties about replacement and loss of agency.​

By taking these myths seriously, this theme examines why certain machine figures become iconic—and what that reveals about the culture building them.