Petting Zoo, a project by Theodore Spyropoulos (DRL Programme Director) of Minimaforms, has opened to the public at the Guangdong Science Centre in Guangzhou, China, as part of the Barbican’s Digital Revolution.

The project, comprising of a speculative life-like robotic environment, raises questions of how future environments could actively enable new forms of communication with the everyday. Artificial intelligent creatures have been designed with the capacity to learn and explore behaviors through interaction with participants. Within this immersive installation interaction with the pets fosters human curiosity and play, forging intimate exchanges that are emotive and evolving over time.

Conceived as an immersive installation environment, social and synthetic forms of systemic interactions allow the pets to engage and evolve their behaviors over time. Pets interact and stimulate participation with users through the use of animate behaviors communicated through kinesis, sound and illumination. These behaviors evolve over time through interaction enabling each pet to develop personalities. Pet interactions are stimulated through interaction with human users or between other pets within the population. Intimacy and curiosity are explored as enabling agents that externalize personal experience through forms of direct visual, haptic and aural communication.

The exhibition will run until March 2019. Watch a video of the Petting Zoo here.

Image credit: © Minimaforms