WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale

ArchaeaBot by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu was selected for the WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland, announced on 19 January 2019. Presented within the biennale’s CZYNNIK LUDZKI / HUMAN ASPECT edition, the work entered a major international context for media art that examined the changing relations between human life, technology, communication, and social systems.

That frame suited ArchaeaBot closely. The installation imagines a future life-form adapted to survival after climate crisis and technological singularity, combining underwater robotics, biomedia, and artificial intelligence with research into archaea. At WRO, those elements were not treated simply as signs of innovation. They became part of a broader curatorial argument about how technological systems shape culture, agency, and the conditions under which life might persist.

For May, the biennale marked an important extension of the work’s reach within international new media exhibition networks. ArchaeaBot asks what forms of intelligence and endurance might remain after human-centred assumptions begin to fail, and WRO’s emphasis on the human aspect gave that question a deliberately critical setting rather than a purely futuristic one.