My Robot Companion on BBC World Service Click

BBC World Service Click featured HARR1, Anna Dumitriu, and Alex May in its coverage of Brighton Digital Festival, bringing My Robot Companion to an international broadcast audience on 17 September 2014. The segment followed the project’s presentation at Fabrica and extended the discussion beyond the gallery, placing the work inside a wider public conversation about robotics, culture, and emerging technologies.

What matters here is the shift in context. Inside the exhibition, HARR1 functions through direct encounter, asking visitors to read boredom, attention, and social awkwardness into a humanoid machine. On radio and online, the project had to travel through description, interview, and reportage instead. That change makes the feature useful because it shows how the work could hold its conceptual focus even when translated into a media format aimed at a broad general audience.

The coverage also reinforces a central strand in May’s wider practice: using technologically complex works to open accessible questions about how people live with systems they do not fully control or understand. In this case, My Robot Companion becomes a way of discussing not only robotics, but the emotional, ethical, and cultural assumptions that shape how machines are introduced into everyday life.