Works
A focused view of collaborative works by Alex May with artists, researchers, and interdisciplinary partners.
Black Rock Beachcombers
2024
With Anna Dumitriu
Three cast-aluminium marker sculptures and an augmented reality app reveal Black Rock's ecological, social, and engineering histories.
Physic-AI Garden
2023
With Anna Dumitriu
Cancer-care drug interactions become a shifting environment of growth, competition, risk, and care in this interactive garden.
Biotechnology from the Blue Flower
2022
With Anna Dumitriu
Chicory moves from Romantic symbol to gene-edited specimen through scans, sculpture, and laboratory material in this installation and AR work.
Culture
2022
With Anna Dumitriu
Breadcrumb-coated architectural models treat settlement itself as something raised, shaped, and inhabited through fermentation.
Fermenting Futures
2022
With Anna Dumitriu
Modified yeast sits inside a sculptural vessel in this bioart installation, asking how biotechnology might be redirected towards less destructive futures.
A Kolkata
2021
With Neel Bhattacharjee, Bappaditya Dasgupta, Ritaban Ghosh, Rohan Mukherjee
A remote collaboration that rebuilds Kolkata from other people's photographs, holding the city at the distance of memory, data, and desire.
ArchaeaBot: Post Singularity Life-forms in a Post Climate Change World
2021
With Anna Dumitriu
ArchaeaBot expands into a speculative underwater world shaped by adaptation, artificial life, and ecological aftermath in this computer-generated video.
Cyberspecies Proximity
2020
With Anna Dumitriu
Socially aware mobile machines stage everyday negotiation in shared public space through a robotic installation and digital twin.
Susceptible
2020
With Anna Dumitriu
Tuberculosis genome research becomes a bodily encounter with infection, treatment, and global interdependence in this installation and video work.
BioComputation Robots
2019
With Anna Dumitriu
Research into photosensitive brain cells and absence seizures becomes a hands-on encounter with care, timing, and biocomputation in this robotic installation.
ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form
2018
With Anna Dumitriu
An underwater robotic installation imagines an archaea-like survivor for worlds shaped by climate collapse and post-human adaptation.
Antisocial Swarm Robots
2017
With Anna Dumitriu
Small avoidance-driven robots prompt visitors to project character, emotion, and social behaviour onto code.
Fallen Angel
2016
With Anna Dumitriu
Projection-mapped weather balloons and a collapsed parachute replay a high-altitude launch as celebration turns into visible failure.
The Human Super-Organism
2015
With Anna Dumitriu
An interactive installation turns bacteria from visitors' hands into spreading digital colonies, making the human microbiome visible at the scale of touch.
Super-Organism
2014
With Anna Dumitriu
A full-body interactive installation reveals visitors as shifting fields of digital bacteria, turning the human microbiome into a public, participatory encounter.
My Robot Companion
2011
With Anna Dumitriu
HARR1's boredom, touch, and facial familiarity test how quickly people form relationships with machines in this robotic installation.
The Art and Science of Linen
2011
With Anna Dumitriu, Dr John Paul, Martin A. Smith
Linen is traced through flax, bacteria, labour, and industrial process in this single-channel video, showing the material as a living cultural system.
Monotone Symphony
2010
With Martin A. Smith
Projected light, movement, and a single sustained musical structure rework Yves Klein's Monotone Symphony as live performance.
Kaidan
2008
With Martin A. Smith
Kyoto Garden becomes a sequence of ghostly encounters shaped by projection, sound, and Japanese folklore in this night-time installation.
Statues Alive
2008
With Martin A. Smith
A night-time projection trail along Chelsea Embankment reanimated public sculpture through video mapping, sound, and interaction.