Exhibition: Androids – Wanda Tuerlinckx

‘Wanda Tuerlinckx captures robots with a 180-year-old photographic camera to visualise the new technological wonders across the borders of time in a historical way of scientific documentation. In collaboration with Erwin R. Boer, a human-machine interaction scientist, they have been traveling the world documenting the current robot revolution.

Today’s technological revolution, for the first time in history, gives physical and perhaps spiritual life to the fruits of our inexhaustible imaginations: Android robots, who look and behave like humans but are machines inside a human appearance, create highly human-like emotional, facial and physical expressions. Androids are intriguing but appear eerie due to subtle imperfections. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described this phenomenon in 1970 as “Uncanny Valley,” a valley that reflects that its complex behaviour is sometimes deeply disturbing to humans; these distortions are caused by unrealistic human expectations projected onto these highly advanced human-like machines.

The androids offer a myriad of human-robot interaction experiences that have been unfathomable for decades. The human element in science imposes its presence nowhere more strongly than in the incarnation of a human-like robot. The convolution of robotics, artificial intelligence and materials science has allowed designers and researchers to experiment with the ultimate question: what does it mean to be human?’ From PCfP website.