Shirty Science: Team Robot

As part of National Science Week 2018, the University of Canberra funded a season of Shirty Science. Shirty Science brings researchers and artists together to develop shirt designs that represent their science.

I was paired with Damith Herath, a researcher in the field of Human Robot Interaction. While Damith’s daily work considers human and robot relations in industrial settings, he is also an accomplished artistic collaborator. Most notably, Damith has developed several projects with transhumanist artist Stelarc. At the time of our collaboration, many of these projects centered around advancing interactions between the public and a screen-bound Artifical Intelligence made in the likeness of Stelarc called the Prosthetic Head. By attaching to similarly intelligent robotic appendages, the head has found a body and evolved into the Articulate Head. Consequently, the collaboration not only between artist and scientist but between robots themselves has expanded the one intelligent unit into an interconnected being that existed not in hyperspace but in our shared, actual environment.

In this design, I considered how, by bringing these two fields together, roboticists and artists envision our experiences of technology not as a threat but as a complex ecosystem of interactions that have become an integrated part of our everyday lived experience.

More information on Damith Herath can be found here

To learn more or buy a shirt head to shirtyscience.com or click the link below.