My New Robot Companion at Bletchley Park

HARR1 from My New Robot Companion was shown at Bletchley Park on 9 and 10 November 2013, presented in the mansion library alongside research robots from the University of Hertfordshire. The event sat alongside the Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition in Hut 12, inviting visitors to meet both the robots and the researchers behind a range of current projects.

In this setting, HARR1 was not framed as a spectacle of technical novelty so much as a figure through which audiences could think about everyday relationships with machines. Shown among other research platforms, the work drew attention to the thin line between laboratory development, public demonstration, and artistic encounter. That emphasis mattered because My New Robot Companion has always been less about robot capability than about how people read intention, boredom, and personality into small mechanical behaviours.

The Bletchley Park context sharpened that question further. A site so closely tied to codebreaking, computation, and the cultural history of machines gave the work an additional historical charge, while keeping the encounter direct and human-scaled. For May, the exhibition extended a wider concern with how technical systems shape trust, interpretation, and the stories people build around them.