Wanda Tuerlinckx, Androids 2023

Today's technological revolution, for the first time in history, gives physical and perhaps spiritual life to the fruits of our inexhaustible imaginations: Android robots, who look and behave like humans but are machines inside a human appearance, create highly human-like emotional, facial and physical expressions. Androids are intriguing but appear eerie due to subtle imperfections. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described this phenomenon in 1970 as 'Uncanny Valley,' a valley that reflects that its complex behavior is sometimes deeply disturbing to humans; these distortions are caused by unrealistic human expectations projected onto these highly advanced human-like machines.

The androids offer a myriad of human-robot interaction experiences that have been unfathomable for decades. The human element in science imposes its presence nowhere more strongly than in the incarnation of a human-like robot. The convolution of robotics, artificial intelligence and materials science has allowed designers and researchers to experiment with the ultimate question: what does it mean to be human?