Antisocial Swarm Robots at HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY

Antisocial Swarm Robots was shown in HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY at Science Gallery Dublin from 10 February to 21 May 2017. Developed by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, the installation placed a group of small robots inside an enclosed arena where each machine attempted to avoid anything entering its personal space. From that minimal rule, the work generated behaviour that felt anxious, territorial, and unexpectedly social.

What made the installation effective in this context was the speed with which viewers read intention into it. The robots do very little in computational terms, but people rapidly infer mood, conflict, and hierarchy from their repeated collisions and evasions. That gap between simple programmed behaviour and rich human interpretation sits at the centre of the work, making it a sharp contribution to an exhibition concerned with automation, agency, and the cultural imagination around machines.

For May, the Dublin presentation made clear how robotics can operate as a way of staging projection rather than demonstrating intelligence. Antisocial Swarm Robots does not present machine behaviour as seamless or anthropomorphic. Instead, it reveals how quickly people supply those meanings themselves. In HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY, that made the work a precise fit: it turned public attention away from abstract claims about intelligent systems and back towards the uneasy social narratives people build around them.