In 2016 LABORATORIA Art&Science team brought from Singapore a tactile interactive robotic installation “BLIND ROBOT” by Louis-Philippe Demers. 

Demers explores body intelligence, borrowed intelligence, and the problem of embodiment. He works on the edge of robotics and social modeling, exploring the possibilities of human interaction with machine intelligence.

Tactile interactive robotic installation is a robotic arm. By sitting in front of the robot, the audience enters into non-verbal contact with the machine. The robot delicately examines the body and face of the viewer, as blind people do, in order to recognize a person or object. The touch effect creates a charged bond potential difference between the human and the robot.

The social context – blindness – deepens the perceptual abyss, but sharpens the emotional resonance. Like a blind person, a robot perceives the world through fundamentally different channels, and we can only get a vague idea of ​​how the robot “sees” the world and ourselves. Can we trust the probing touch of a robotic hand and empathize with a radically alien view of the world? “Blind Robot” becomes an artistic and critical study of scientific developments in social robotics.