Earlier this year, dancer Mor Mendel took the stage with Boston Dynamics’ Spot at 7×7, an annual symposium organized by the born-digital art and culture organization Rhizome, to perform a work choreographed by multidisciplinary techno artist Miriam Simun. Mendel ran, danced and romped with the robot (piloted by Hannah Rossi) to a soundtrack of Igor Tkachenko and DJ Dedein in front of an audience eager to witness collaboration between artists and scientists in action. Spot, as one might expect, stole the show, but there would have been no show without Simun, who conceived of the piece with questions, not answers, in mind. Specifically: “What kind of relationships with machines do we want? What will we get? What can we dream of?”
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Simun’s dreams encompass everything from cheese made from human milk to technology that captures the scent of endangered flowers to bees and their conspicuous absence. The artist, who works in video, installation, painting, performance and communal sensorial experiences, trained in sociology and has carried her experiences with her in a role she calls artist-as-fieldworker—”conducting first-person research with diverse places and communities: from scientific laboratories to rewilded forests, from freedivers to human pollinators” that........