The world is in Trouble, capital ‘T’-rouble;  global conflicts, resource shortages, climate chaos, extinction, denaturation, and runaway technology.

 

Women have long been held responsible for society writ large, while men remain charged with the current state of the global economy, military actions, and contemporary politics. We have been made material as property to trade for breeding, social advantage and emotional, as well as physical, surrogacy. Our value remains most qualified as non-expressive and decorative, measured by physical traits and how we enhance and present ourselves. However, throughout history, women have been making trouble, being trouble, solving trouble(s); acting as makers, artists, thinkers, and political advocates. 

 

As equality with men looms closer on the horizon, a female-led overview of how women are working in emerging technologies surrounding Robotic Fabrication, Social Robotics and AI is timely and revealing. With the ability to now outsource traditionally domestic duties to machines, the technology readily available to automate this labour, and with higher education and research grants open to all genders, a platform emerges for women to lead in creative thought, in socio-technical constructs, and in the use of materials to design a way forward for socio-collaborative existences between human beings and our newest labourers: robots. Where this isn’t always a straight and simple path, revered feminist theorist Donna Haraway recommends keeping with it, worrying it, troubling the problem until we find ourselves as required, “… staying with the trouble… making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become - with each other or not at all...”.

 

Haraway charges women with this social experiment, with making strange and with making kin, and then, with either coming together or flying apart from the living beings inhabiting the planet. She charges us with making trouble. The curators of SHErobots accept this challenge, with collaborations alongside the uncanny, and by creating SHErobots: Ecologies of Care. 

 

This exhibition explores women who robot (she ‘robots’, a verb), using robotics within the broader context of ecologies, as multi-species and environmental entanglements, encompassing care for both humans and non-humans. It is composed of three core themes: Strange Bodies, Systems Care, and Materialities Reset. These showcase thought-provoking works that provide insight into our evolving understanding of these complex dynamics, with art videos, process videos, physical objects fabricated for and by robots, customised end effectors for robots, robot bodies and origin stories of research, art and design.

 

SHErobots: Ecologies of Care invites everyone to consider robotics as a catalyst to innovate a future that deeply cares for humankind, partner species and our finite environment. Charged with the power to disrupt norms and redefine collaboration, women in the realm of SHErobots embrace the challenge of 'making trouble’, leading a revolutionary exploration of technology, ecology, and care to reshape our collective future.

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Room Sheet for SHErobots: Ecologies of Care - Link to Room Sheet (NTRO)

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Exhibition History | SHErobots::tool::toy::companion | Tin Sheds Galleries | University of Sydney, Australia |   22 Oct -12 Dec 2022 | Catalogue

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