‘Hello Robot’ is a travelling exhibition exposing the latest [Ro]botic presence in our not short to come future lifestyles. With a little bit of history from Star Wars up to Transformers and some exotic early robotic ventures you are almost immediately exposed to the latest Robot and Bot techniques.
For those who have all ready a general interest in Robotica there is not much to discover, though putting all those latest trends and possibilities together in one space is somehow very awkwardly compelling. For sure the video by Keiichi Matsuda taking you shopping with continuous floating advertisements and virtual assistants beamed at your eyes by VR glasses is certainly a schizophrenic shop experience. The video shows us a cruel digital capitalistic world in a over the top manner. Hand in hand goes the Nursing Robot’s the digital nanny to be, as also something we should think of whether this is the way forward.
But on the opposite the robotic Exoskeleton giving people with paralyzed extremities a walking future is not something to discuss but should be common very soon anyway.
In between the high technocratic world there were also some nicely floating analogue robots as being fairylike dancers making really tiny movements by vaporizing water from their glass bellies.
And at the moment you start to think that robots can in all their expressions be beautiful and a useful addition to us, the question literally hanging above you is; “would you live in a robot?”
We visited ‘Hello Robot’ during our visit at Vitra Weil am Rhein at the Vitra museum.