HARR1 at Fabrica for Brighton Digital Festival 2014
· exhibition
Alex May and Anna Dumitriu presented HARR1 at Fabrica for Brighton Digital Festival, using conversation and public interaction to open debate around robotics and social behaviour.
An Afternoon with HARR1 took place at Fabrica in Brighton on 3 September 2014 as part of Brighton Digital Festival. Hosted by Lorenza Ippolito in conversation with Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, the event introduced visitors to HARR1, the humanoid robot at the centre of My Robot Companion, and turned the gallery into a space for direct encounter, discussion, and public questioning.
What made the event work was the way it used conversation alongside embodied interaction. Visitors were able to meet HARR1 and then discuss the wider issues the project raises, including robot carers and sexual partners, military funding in the technology sector, the environmental impact of robotics, and the effect of automation on employment. That combination of live encounter and debate is central to how May’s work operates: the robot matters not only as an object, but as a way of making difficult questions social and immediate.
Within the wider practice, My Robot Companion remains one of the clearest examples of May using technological systems to explore how people project feeling, ethics, and expectation onto machines. Presented in the context of Brighton Digital Festival, HARR1 became a catalyst for public discussion about the kinds of relationships emerging technologies invite, resist, or normalise.