My New Robot Companion: HARR1 at Watermans

HARR1, the latest incarnation of My New Robot Companion, was shown at Watermans in London from 21 September to 23 October 2013. The exhibition presented the project as a close encounter with a humanoid robot designed not around task efficiency, but around small, continuous behaviours such as fidgeting, looking, and boredom.

That behavioural emphasis is what gives the work its force. If a visitor moves in front of HARR1, the robot responds by looking back; if the visitor stops, it loses interest and returns to scanning the room. Those slight shifts are enough to turn a technical system into something that feels social, uncertain, and oddly familiar, bringing attention to how quickly people project intention and emotion onto machines.

Developed by Alex May with Anna Dumitriu as part of their artistic residency with the University of Hertfordshire, the project reflects a wider concern in May’s practice with how technology shapes presence, attention, and belief. Here that happens through robotics rather than image-making, but the underlying question remains similar: how easily do we accept a constructed system as something we can recognise, trust, or relate to?