Gallery Entry

I/Another

By Animaspace · NL

Their name is Another. They are a many-limbed robotic sculpture made from 3D-printed parts joined through hand embroidery: visibly mechanical, fragile, and strong through interconnection. Yet in their presence, something unfamiliar begins to feel alive. I/Another is an interactive installation that opens a threshold encounter: a suspended moment before language settles, before hierarchy fixes bodies in place, and before human and machine are assigned their roles. A visitor approaches Another through movement, not commands. A shift of weight, a pause, a change of distance or rhythm enters a system of sensing and custom algorithms. Another moves in response; the visitor adjusts in turn. Each movement changes the conditions for what can happen next. I created I/Another to ask: can a conversation happen without understanding? Another has no human face or voice and does not need to recognise our emotions. Their difference remains. The invitation is not to master that difference, but to attend to it. Tension, hesitation, synchrony and resistance become forms of an unfamiliar relational language. We may notice our urge to lead, our discomfort with uncertainty, or our capacity to follow what we cannot predict. Another's hand-stitched body makes this question tangible. Their separate parts hold together through visible connections; fragility is not concealed beneath the appearance of flawless technology. The participant, too, becomes part of the computation through which the encounter unfolds. Human and robot continually reshape one another's possibilities for movement. This reciprocity is not symmetrical: Another does not acquire lasting knowledge of a person, while the person brings interpretation, memory and feeling. Neither fully determines the encounter. This is also my alternative vision of intelligence. A powerful imaginary surrounding generative AI treats culture as an immense archive: if enough of the past can be recorded, its patterns might be used to statistically produce what comes next. I/Another asks what such a picture leaves out, especially knowledge that lives in bodies, in unrepeatable situations, and in relations that have not yet happened. Rather than locating intelligence inside an autonomous machine, the work explores it as something enacted between bodies, materials, sensing, algorithms, space and shared time. Robot Another is honest in their fragility and strong through interconnection, like structures that do not absorb force but distribute it. They merge with the audience, making each participant part of the computation through which they come alive. This distributed aliveness draws the encounter into magical realism where no two encounters resolve the same way. Another spreads their otherness, leaving each person with a stamp of strangeness and wonder.

Category

VISUAL ART

Approved

15 October 2026