Cyberspecies Proximity

Alex May developed Cyberspecies Proximity with Anna Dumitriu as a robotic artwork about sharing sidewalks, lifts, and galleries with socially aware machines. The project centres on a small humanoid robot that navigates space, reads bodies through camera-based tracking, and responds with its own gestures rather than simple mimicry. Dressed in workers’ clothes and built to feel fragile rather than dominant, it turns way-finding technology, body language, and design bias into a direct encounter with automation.

The encounter matters more than the engineering on display. Visitors read hesitation, deference, awkwardness, and intent into a machine built from tracking, navigation, and coded behaviour, so social space becomes something jointly produced by human expectation and technical design. That tension runs through May’s practice, where systems are often most revealing when they start to feel personal.

Additional notes

• Developed through a STARTS residency in collaboration with Schindler’s Human Robot Co-Mobility project, supported by the VERTIGO project as part of the European Commission’s STARTS programme, with support from Stichting Waag Society.
• Programmed in C++ and Fugio, the open source visual programming system created by Alex May, using SLAM navigation together with Intel RealSense tracking and depth camera sensors.
• The project includes Cyberspecies Proximity: Digital Twin, a screen-based version built from the same CAD assets and code base as the physical robot for venues where a mobile robot is not practical.
• The robot premiered at CENTQUATRE in Paris from 28 February to 1 March 2020 as part of the STARTS Residency Days, and later versions were shown at ZKM in Karlsruhe and Centre des arts Enghien-les-Bains in 2021-22.