Soft robots

Rather than chasing a Western futurist vision of what lies ahead, the exhibition Soft Robots invites a tender, poteic attention to the now — and to what might quietly emerge from it.

Bringing together 15 international artists and artist duos, Soft Robots explores life within a technological ecology, and questions the future we are shaping for ourselves. In cultural moment shaped by the attention economy — where perception, emotion, and connection are algorithmically governed — it opens toward alternate epistemologies and cosmologies.

The desire to locate pulse, soul, heartbeat, love — or intelligence — inside the mechanical has long driven the fascination with technological development. But the impulse to breathe life into the non-living is not a modern obsession; it is an ancient longing, rooted in myth and imaginative traditions, where technology, magic, and storytelling have always been intertwined.

As a researcher in digital culture, I’m curious about how algorithms act as co-authors of what we see — of visual culture itself — shaping not only the circulation of images, but also how meaning is distributed, polarised, and distorted within algorithmically curated attention ecologies. In a time when culture, politics, and extremism clash in the ongoing battle for attention, popular culture has become the primary stage on which these tensions are performed, negotiated, and amplified.

The algorithmic darling of the attention economy: Reality TV

Few formats embody this entanglement as clearly as the algorithmic darling of the attention economy: Reality TV. Over time, reality TV has become more than a genre — it’s a logic, a dramaturgical system that has come to define how we think about visibility, truth, and emotional resonance in digital life. It fascinates me because it mirrors our time so precisely: it captures the way performance and affect collapse into one, how we’re constantly asked to feel, confess, react, and reveal.

That’s exactly why I was drawn to WangShui’s Certainty of the Flesh (2023), which stages a sensorial entanglement between data, desire, and identity formation. At its core is a narrative-generating algorithm trained on two systems obsessed with interiority and spectacle: psychoanalysis and reality TV. This pairing is telling — both operate by scripting confession, exaggerating emotion, and blurring the line between performance and confessional intimacy. The result is a living, breathing storyline in which digital characters express a near-human longing for intimacy. Scenes loop, shift, and evolve without clear beginning or end, creating a continuous flow of presence and entanglement.

The materially layered installation — composed of LED portals and semi-transparent screens — forms an almost intimate, shifting domestic space. Within this environment, humanoid figures fold into and out of each other’s presence, echoing the ways we continually re-script and project versions of ourselves — both for others and for our own gaze. The title draws from Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and echoes its exploration of hybrid identity across species. Likewise, WangShui’s work points to a reality in which technology is no longer merely a tool, but an extension — or even a formation — of identity itself.

If WangShui’s work explores how algorithms reshape identity from within, AI Hyperrealism turns outward — toward the spectacle of images in crisis. Here, the question of what is artificial or real, soft or hard, false or true echoes what Naomi Klein has described as “the mirror world” in Doppelganger (2023): a reality fractured by disinformation, visual duplication, and ideological polarisation — ‘the national’ and ‘the global,’ ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke.’ As Marie Laurberg notes in her introduction: “Naomi Klein situates the doppelgänger as a prime metaphor of our current cultural and political realm.”

AI Hyperrealism

Martyna Marciniak’s AI Hyperrealism (2024) is a poignant reflection on the instability of truth and image. Based on an AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a white Balenciaga coat — a fake that went viral during the so-called AI boom of 2023 — the work becomes a forensic inquiry into how such images are produced, circulated, and perceived. It challenges our relationship to photography and visual documentation, revealing how easily images can be manipulated, fragmented, and believed. In a time when synthetic images possess the power to spread disinformation, AI Hyperrealism invites us to reconsider not only what we see, but the authority we assign to images — and the systems (technological, cultural, spiritual) that render them legible or real.

Herndon and Dryhurst likewise explore how digital identities are used, shaped, and controlled in an AI-driven reality. In their work xhairymutantx, they highlight the paradox between technological advancement and the erosion of personal autonomy. Based on a custom AI model trained to generate exaggerated, distorted versions of Herndon’s face — especially her red hair, a feature that becomes algorithmically overemphasised — the work exposes how identity is constructed through invisible infrastructures of data, training sets, and speculative self-representation.

xhairymutantx is not just an image but a system: an ongoing experiment in what it means to own your image in a world where everything can be reproduced but not easily governed. As new iterations of “Holly” circulate, they may themselves become training data for future models — amplifying the very feedback loop the project critiques.

Herndon and Dryhurst’s broader practice insists that the digital is not an abstraction but a lived, embodied, and politicised space — where aesthetics, ethics, and rights converge. Their work at the intersection of AI, music, and ‘protocol development’ includes projects like Spawning, a platform allowing artists to opt out of AI training datasets, and PD12M, a public-domain image-text dataset created to challenge dominant practices in AI development.

We are increasingly reaction-ready and binary-bound — primed to respond, to choose sides, to believe or discredit instantly. In this landscape, the image doesn’t need to be true; it just needs to perform. With art as a space for reflection, technology is understood not as a rupture with the past, but as something deeply rooted in an historically grounded longing to connect with what lies beyond the human — long-standing cultural traditions that imagine life emerging from craft, code and clay.

A love story

Freed from the forward-driving logic of techno-hype and future-fetishism, Alice Bucknell turns to popular culture — specifically gaming — as a space for relational speculation. In SMALL VOID (2025), a cooperative two-player video game developed in collaboration with theoretical physicists at CERN and game designers from Papialoop, Bucknell reimagines the multiverse through the lens of interspecies attachment, micro and cosmic relationships, and quantum entanglement. Players are invited to ‘sense’ one another through sound and movement rather than vision, navigating a shared landscape shaped by miscommunication, longing, and affective tension.

The work draws inspiration from lichen — a symbiotic organism composed of fungus and algae, thriving in inhospitable environments. Neither one thing nor the other, lichen defies conventional biological categories and becomes a metaphor for hybridity, co-existence, and ambiguous identity. Bucknell uses this entangled lifeform as a conceptual and aesthetic anchor to explore forms of non-binary being: not as escapism or speculative techno-futurism, but as a framework for a deep, tender, and attentive engagement with the present. SMALL VOID doubles as a queer dating simulator — a slow game of connection and dependency in a world where touch, presence, and mutual sensing are the only ways forward.

The exhibition ultimately turns the mirror not only on the technologies we create, but on the culture they co-produce and continuously reproduce. We may be living at the neoliberal peak of humanity’s relentless self-absorption with technology, yet Soft Robots insists that art can still offer a sensuous jolt — breathing life into the vulnerability, soul, and pulse gradually lost in a world obsessed with progress, precision, and control.

H.C. Andersen’s The Nightingale, which inspires the curatorial framework of the exhibition, offers a poetic critique of a species enthralled by its own inventions — a narcissistic humanity that worships technology as a redemptive force. Published at the height of industrialization, Andersen’s tale stages the tension between the living and the artificial, between poetry and mechanism — a tension that remains urgently relevant. From the mechanical bird to today’s techno-fantasies, Soft Robots traces a persistent techno-philosophy: the belief that human emotion, thought, and being might one day be replicated — or even surpassed — by machines. This exhibition doesn’t just question that dream. It questions the worldview that sustains it.

Soft Robots
The Art of Digital Breathing
June 20–December 31, 2025

Author: Katrine K. Pedersen, PhD Fellow at the University of Copenhagen