ArchaeaBot at Science Gallery Bengaluru

ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form was featured in SUBMERGE, the first exhibition season presented by Science Gallery Bengaluru. Announced on 19 December 2019, the exhibition brought together artists, scientists, engineers, historians, and storytellers to think through water as a material, political, and ecological condition rather than a neutral resource.

That context gave ArchaeaBot a strong fit. Developed by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, the work imagines a speculative organism shaped by climate change, microbial endurance, and technological adaptation. Within SUBMERGE, those ideas were placed alongside wider questions about extraction, depletion, environmental imbalance, and the uneven futures that emerge from them. The exhibition showed how the work could operate within a broader interdisciplinary conversation while keeping its focus on survival, change, and post-human possibility.

For May, the Bengaluru presentation mattered because it connected the project’s speculative ecology to a public programme centred on real environmental pressures. ArchaeaBot does not treat water only as backdrop or metaphor. It uses an underwater robotic form to think about the conditions under which life might persist after damage, and about how technological imagination can open difficult questions about responsibility, resilience, and the futures we are actively making.