ArchaeaBot in Magic Machines at Technische Sammlungen Dresden
· exhibition
ArchaeaBot was included in Magic Machines at Technische Sammlungen Dresden, placing the work's speculative robotics within an exhibition about invention, automation, and the cultural life of machines.
Alex May and Anna Dumitriu’s ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form was included in Magic Machines at Technische Sammlungen Dresden in Germany, opening on 1 July 2022. The exhibition brought together historical and contemporary works that considered how machines shape daily life, collective imagination, and the wider culture around invention.
Within that context, ArchaeaBot shifted the idea of the machine away from efficiency and utility towards survival, adaptation, and speculative future life. By imagining an archaea-like robotic being adapted to a post-climate-change world, the work brought biological thinking, artificial intelligence, and robotics into an exhibition concerned with both the wonder and unease that machines can produce.
The presentation extended a wider strand of May’s practice in which technological systems are used to test how reality is recorded, transformed, and held in memory. In ArchaeaBot, the machine is not treated as spectacle or solution, but as a way of asking what kinds of life and meaning might persist when familiar human structures begin to fail.