Robot Bodies is an interactive digital work installed as a single screen projection with an interactive trackball mounted on a plinth.

This work is based on an earlier version shown at Bluecoat in 1998, commissioned by FACT for Revolution98, part of ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art): Change the World.

A reconfigured version of Robot Bodies was shown at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Pittsburgh, USA in 2001. It has been updated and re-programmed for this exhibition. Here, the Robot, the Android and the Cyborg are examined as metaphorical carriers of contemporary anxieties around racial difference through an interactive essay, navigable through the trackball interface.

Exploring Robots, Androids and Cyborgs in science-fiction as metaphor for the ‘other’

The Little Robots Diary, a constantly looping video and text sequence on a monitor adjacent to the entrance, forms a preamble, not just to Robot Bodies, but also to the exhibition as a whole. Through it we are introduced to one of the show’s central tropes, the unit of simple brute labour, but also of revolutionary potential: the ‘little robot’.