Antisocial Swarm Robots
Small avoidance-driven robots prompt visitors to project character, emotion, and social behaviour onto code.
Alex May developed Antisocial Swarm Robots with Anna Dumitriu as a robotic installation built around a simple rule: each small machine tries to avoid anything that enters its personal space. Inside a low enclosed arena, the robots circle, collide, retreat, and sometimes disable one another, producing behaviour that feels nervous, territorial, and unexpectedly social. The work is less about technical complexity than about how quickly visitors read intention, mood, and character into moving systems.
The robots do very little, but viewers do a great deal. They infer temperament, conflict, and social hierarchy from repeated avoidance routines, building narratives faster than the machines can justify them. That quick conversion of behaviour into meaning is central to May’s practice, where technological systems often reveal as much about human projection as about the code itself.
Additional notes
- Created in collaboration with Anna Dumitriu.
- Developed from a prototype shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, during Digital (Dis)connections: Ai Weiwei Late in 2015.
- Commissioned by Science Gallery Dublin for Humans Need Not Apply, shown from 10 February to 21 May 2017.
- Later exhibited at QUAD Derby in Our Friends Electric, Lodz Design Festival, IMPAKT in Utrecht, Schaumbad Graz in Machine Divas, and Ugly Duck, London, in Intelligent Machinery.
- Built from small mobile robots using ultrasound sensing and identical control code to generate emergent behaviour.
- Video documentation: Vimeo
Selected images
