Robot Photographic Exhibition: Wanda Tuerlinckx ‘Androids’

Please join us at the Perth Centre for Photography on Friday, July 2023 for the Australian debut exhibition of ‘Androids’ by international photographic artist, Wanda Tuerlinckx and ‘Labours of Love’ by Kate Golding, an exploration of the caregiving journey using a camera-less 19th century method.

Wanda Tuerlinckx ANDROIDS

Wanda Tuerlinckx captures robots with a 180-year-old photographic camera to visualise the new technological wonders across the borders of time in a historical way of scientific documentation. In collaboration with Erwin R. Boer, a human-machine interaction scientist, they have been travelling the world documenting the current robot revolution.

Today’s technological revolution, for the first time in history, gives physical and perhaps spiritual life to the fruits of our inexhaustible imaginations: Android robots, who look and behave like humans but are machines inside a human appearance, create highly human-like emotional, facial and physical expressions. Androids are intriguing but appear eerie due to subtle imperfections.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described this phenomenon in 1970 as “Uncanny Valley,” a valley that reflects that its complex behavior is sometimes deeply disturbing to humans; these distortions are caused by unrealistic human expectations projected onto these highly advanced human-like machines.

The androids offer a myriad of human-robot interaction experiences that have been unfathomable for decades. The human element in science imposes its presence nowhere more strongly than in the incarnation of a human-like robot. The convolution of robotics, artificial intelligence, and materials science has allowed designers and researchers to experiment with the ultimate question: what does it mean to be human?

Wanda Tuerlinckx is a Belgian artist based in Amsterdam. Her photographs are part of the collections of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Amsterdam City Archives. Since 2015 Wanda has been photographing robots with a wooden camera from the 1880s using photographic paper as negatives. Together with Erwin R. Boer, a Cognitive Robotics professor at Delft University of Technology, she has been traveling the world documenting the current robot revolution.

Exhibition opening 7 July 2023, 6 pm

357 Murray Street Perth WA (Ground Floor)

RSVP essential