Little Lost Robots
Well, I’m not too proud to admit that I did not see that coming in 2020. After an absolute horror show of a year, we’re back at home / still at home, respectively locked down and juggling the daily demands of a full house and homeschooling young children. Despite this, we are not cutting loose on our dreams. Now more than ever we need to be examining the applications of sensitive, smart robotic technology for safely maintaining and rebuilding communities, in an ever more digitised world.
So as we carefully bring our systems back online here at Little Lost Robot Studio, first we’re going to take a short and heavily edited peek back at the year that wasn’t…
2020 Vision
In a heartwarmingly generous move, the Arts Council mobilised quickly last spring, opening up a series or emergency funding rounds offering nothing short of life support for the cultural industries. We watched other smaller funding bodies close their doors, some temporally and some never to reopen, as the industry suffered inevitable losses from economic shockwaves of the pandemic. We’ve seen performers stranded on location, concerts performed to isolated platforms, Royal Opera streamed into care homes and and the more bizarre end of the scale – pop-up circus smuggled onto location in a potato delivery scandal. And let’s not forget poor ‘Fatima’, a symbol of the value of creativity versus capitalism.
During this extremely shaky time, our Co Director Ruby helped a number of creative organisations gain their cultural recovery funding and develop your own practice funding from the Arts Council, to sustain and protect their work and livelihoods. She did this by helping to guide individuals, through the application process, with her targeted knowledge of arts funding and broad comprehension of our industry. We are very proud of her efforts and her foresight to divert her time and resourcefulness towards this cause, during what was a very high intensity period of our professional lives.
There are of course many other creative casualties. Too much work will now go unmade and unfinished. So another area of focus we will explore this year is creativity in captivity. The pandemic is exposing skills rust throughout every profession that has shut down or greatly reduced as a result of the virus. We will maintain a focus on asking how can creative professionals sustain meaningful connectivity to our work and our industry during extended periods of isolation? Wider to the problem of National lockdown, creative professionals are prone to rolling periods of disassociation from their professional lives due to other life changes, potentially impacted by parenting or caring duties, chronic illness, mental health and poor accessibility, amongst others.
We will examine digital community building during this next phase of development. Focusing on meaningful, non-passive digital experiences, with the aim of researching what genuine digital community building could look like. More than ever we need incidental disruption to urban environments that does not require permission or forethought to attend, which is sensitive and sensible to our needs and encourages us to find different ways of being present. Can a digital interface ever really be enough?
Zooming in
The delaying of our Playable Spaces showcase and eventual move to a digital presentation as opposed to a live showcase in Autumn 2020 saw us stretch out our resources into a stasis of suspended animation, which is why you haven’t heard from us in a long while. Despite this, the Studio has maintained a semblance of progress.
We have been remotely teaching our Soft Robotic Workshops to children with the help of The Theatre Royal Bath and The Egg, children’s theatre. We have also successfully received funding to continue to develop this programme of remote teaching, alongside developing tool kits and guides for families to reproduce this type of work at home.
We have also developed a programme of showcase opportunities for our Playable Spaces for Urban Places with Bath and North East Somerset City Council and partnering with Bath Fringe, Forests of the Imagination and Keynsham Music Festival. We will be talking a lot more about this and our work towards creating access to safe, social smart spaces throughout 2021.
Reboot 2021
So now that we have dusted off our diodes, here is a quick overview of what we do and what you can expect from us over the coming months.
We make sensory, immersive and digital artwork that hybridises automation and smart robotics with humanness being the core purpose.
We make visible the risks to standard of living for outsider communities and we hack emerging technologies with the purpose of influencing the built environment to thereby exist in a world that is more sensitive to our collective physical and mental well-being.
Humans are not a currency to be valued for our productivity, humanity is the purpose. We celebrate a future that is gloriously humane in all its messy domestic parts.
Our mission is to demystify emerging technologies and provide genuine and safe public accessibility to playable urban spaces, immediately.
