Intelligent Machinery Exhibition

Intelligent Machinery was an exhibition and events programme by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May at Ugly Duck in London, announced on 9 September 2019. Running across 27 to 29 September 2019, the project brought together installations, robotic artworks, and a public symposium to examine robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and biocomputation through artistic and scientific perspectives rather than promotional narratives of technological progress.

That framing mattered because the exhibition was designed explicitly as an antidote to the hype surrounding deep learning and recurring predictions about AI’s future. Works including ArchaeaBot, Antisocial Swarm Robots, BioComputation Robots, elements of My Robot Companion, and algorithmic image-making research opened out different ways of thinking about intelligence, agency, and behaviour. Instead of treating machines as seamless or inevitable, the programme emphasised uncertainty, embodiment, social projection, and the real research contexts that sit behind these systems.

For May, this exhibition brought several strands of the wider practice into direct conversation. Robotics, machine learning, and algorithmic image systems were not presented as separate technical specialisms, but as related ways of asking how technology changes perception, social behaviour, and what counts as intelligence. In that sense, Intelligent Machinery was less a showcase of devices than a structured argument about how art can slow down technological narratives and make them available for public scrutiny.