Digital Love… or something like it

New York based artist Kacie Kinzer’s public works of art are a fun concept that pushes surrounding observers to question how they interact with the inhabitants of urban space… in her case, it’s how they interact with robots.

Her project, Tweenbot, involves placing a 12 inch cardboard robot in public spaces and seeing how the people around interact with it. The tweenbot only moves in straight lines so it depends on people passing by to reorient it. While she originally assumed suspicion, negligence or mischief would quickly destroy the idea, she was surprised by the level of support and interaction her robot received.

The first task, getting the robot from the Northeast corner of Washington Park to the Southwest corner actually took 42 minutes with the help of 29 unknowing participants. Here’s a map of the Tweenbot’s journey.

here’s a short youtube video that Kinzer recorded as she observed her project’s path from afar

As we often get far too comfortable in our surroundings, i think its refreshing to a lighthearted idea ask us to step out of our comfort zone and show a little compassion with no real reward.