Re/pair is a pop-up exhibition contemplating the feelings of anxiety all humans have about feeling unanswered in an interactive world. Addressing this angst with interactive technology (in this case, creative robotics) allows for dialogue in, response to, and reflection on potential communication between humans and machines. The alternative to being acknowledged and synchronising with intelligent systems, is silence; no reception of our proffered dialogue, and so no hope for a response unless we try again. And so humans send their offer of engagement again; and wait, again, for a response. The potential silence from intelligent systems leaves humans, with the potential that we may all be unanswered, and that there is possibly no solution to this condition… enter anxiety.

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In an attempt to repair this communication error and alleviate anxiety, both design and software engineering offer prototyping as a way to move through such errors, to restore communications. Art, then, offers us the platform with which to engage the experiment with audiences. As the 3rd in a series of interventions spanning emerging and established practitioners, Deborah proposes to engage in an audience-centred inquiry into prototyping interactive artworks comprised of robotic elements. This will culminate in an exhibition space where audience members can feed back on the artworks  to inform the next iteration.  Here the visitor’s input will drive the future of the artworks, with the audience at the very centre of the artworks. When the engagement occurs, the communication is acknowledged, and humans and machine systems can synchronise, identify errors, being reparations, and find a mutual way forward.

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Showcasing the current in-progress works of artists affiliated with the Creative Robotics Lab (UNSW Art & Design), Deborah hopes to enrich the methodologies currently in use within New Media Curation, by intervening into existing festival and exhibition scenarios. Within these rigorous exhibition platforms, she introduces variables such as disruption and notions of the [in]authentic or hyperreal to gauge the audience’s experience of the prototypes, mirroring questions within the study of creative robotics and human-computer interaction. The artists currently participating are Mari Velonaki, Petra Gemeinboeck, Alex Davies, Rochelle Hayley, Wade Marynowsky, Julian Knowles and Patricia Flanagan. Each artist is designing or making their work with aesthetics in mind, with works featuring a performative element, such as assistive actions, movement, dance, cinema, musical performance or the body at rest, as interfered with by robotic exterior of the works.