A search for potential future roles of robotics and AI in our society. Learning and unlearning of locomotions in post-anthropocentric environments and times. The work playfully explores the ambiguity of disarming as a process of physical detachment and emotional attachment.

Locomotion can be seen as a primal (post-birth) instinct and the ultimate act of independence. A robotic limb, somehow detached from a human-constructed technological body, tries to find concepts for advancing movements even though it initially wasn’t made for locomotion – vulnerable yet determined. Parallel to a familiar dystopian plot of technological autonomy and the feelings going with it, witnessing these first clumsy tries may awaken compassion or even a certain emotional bond. disarming paints a picture of a relational world with and between independence and still connectedness.

Emanuel Gollob investigates today’s relations of humans, artificial intelligence and robots with the goal of making alternative relations bodily experienceable. In parallel, his work traces the change in human perception in connection to digitalization. Gollob graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna with a diploma in Design Investigation. From 2020 to 2021, he was an artist in residence at MindSpaces, an EU research project in the STARTS initiative framework. Since 2020, he has been a PhD candidate and researcher at the University of Arts Linz. In 2023, he was a guest artist at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Subsequently, he became a European Media Art Plattform residence artist at the WRO Art Center. Gollob’s work has recently been exhibited in various international institutions, including Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building, Washington DC (2021); Science Gallery Melbourne (2021); Art Science Museum Singapore (2022) and HEK Basel (2023), among others.