All that is Solid Melts into Air
This project emerged from a seemingly mundane moment—a conversation with a friend about robotic quadrupedal machines, or "robot dogs," that had begun to populate our social media feeds. These machines are dialectical by nature: their cultural presence oscillates between the whimsical and the militaristic. Historically, their development stems from a desire to create artificial companions, evoking the longstanding human impulse to mechanize life. Yet, their most significant advancements have been driven by military applications—deployed as scouts, surveillance drones, or even weaponized units in conflict zones.
Online, we encounter viral videos of people playfully walking these machines with leashes and collars, masking their engineered purpose behind a veneer of domesticity. However, this performative domestication obscures a darker reality. Already, these robots are being fitted with rifles and penetrative weapons, patrolling war-torn landscapes in search of targets. While currently remote-operated, their trajectory points toward fully autonomous AI systems—machines that will soon identify and engage subjects based on algorithmic decision-making, inevitably shaped by embedded biases.
These devices are not merely tools but ideological objects: designed for foreign intervention, they materialize the convergence of surveillance capitalism, militarized technology, and the normalization of automated violence. My research interrogates this duality, exploring how the robot dog functions as both a cultural spectacle and a geopolitical instrument—one that renders the boundaries between the everyday and the battlefield increasingly porous.
My artistic intervention emerges from a need to disrupt its engineered form, evolving its body into a site where biological and technological distinctions collapse. In my work, the machine is anthropomorphized yet grotesquely reconfigured—muscle fibers rupture through its exoskeleton, my own face protrudes unnaturally from its chassis. It becomes neither purely human nor machine, but a hybrid entity: a metabolized body that resists easy categorization. This distortion mirrors the ambiguous ethics of its real-world counterparts, forcing a confrontation with the latent violence embedded in its design. By reimagining its anatomy, I expose the unstable thresholds between organism and mechanism, utility and horror, the civilian and the militarized.