Poetic Animatronics Through Hands-On Systems
PATHOS was a collaboration between Indo-Danish art duo Aparna Rao and Søren Pors (Pors & Rao) and Wyss Zurich. The project created life-like “beings” animated with sentient behavior patterns, addressing the technical difficulties encountered in crafting robotics into a language of affective motion and response. The aim of the collaboration was to open up highly complex technologies to artistic expression and the field of visual aesthetics. By developing friendly interfaces that allow non-engineers to intuitively define and control robotic animation, PATHOS facilitated conditions for using robotics as a viable personal medium. With modular robotic platforms and kits, artists and designers could reuse and adapt, rather than building from scratch, and could expand to incorporate changing technologies.
During their time at Wyss Zurich, the PATHOS team developed innovative pilot projects in collaboration with a curated group of visual arts practitioners as a way to test and demonstrate how the technology could
(a) facilitate new forms of visual expression;
(b) tap into the notion of a perceived living presence, where complex inner states are
revealed through the nuances of physical behavior;
(c) democratize access to expensive hardware and complex engineering software;
and
(d) improve the robustness of unsupervised, moving robotics in public exhibition
spaces.
