Composer, performer and roboticist Sarah Angliss undertakes a part-time residency at Pervasive Media Studio, to explore poetic approaches to robotics on stage:

Over the last six years, Sarah Angliss has been performing live with music augmented by robotics. Most of the robots she has created are figurative or electromechanical updates of ancient instruments. One, for example is Hugo, a roboticised 1930s ventriloquist’s dummy who performs vocal samples. Another is Wolfgang, a miniature robot drummer in a dapper 1960s suit. And then there’s The Ealing Feeder, a polyphonic carillon (bell rig) that plays riffs at lightning speed. Sarah is fond of these bandmates and knows they have quite an impact on stage, but she's keen to develop her practice and devise more poetic forms of robotic performance that don't rely on human figures and other traditional tropes. With the generous support of Arts Council England, Sarah is now planning to take time out of her performing schedule and experiment with more imaginative combinations of music and roboticised objects

Supported by Watershed and Falmouth University, Sarah will spend dedicated time at Pervasive Media Studio and AiR Falmouth to develop Trace, a live electronic music and poetic robotic performance that takes discarded everyday possessions - handbags, furniture, kitchen utensils and so on – and robotically animates them so they mimic the breaths, postural changes, arm movements and other gestures of their former owners. She’s also planning to include sounds from the objects as they move and (where possible) fragments of conversations with their owners.

Through this work, Sarah hopes to create a new, poetic form of motion capture: an impressionistic playback of absent persons, using their discarded, former possessions. She’s aiming for a humanistic yet non-figurative form of robotic art that’s distinct from traditional automata and stereotypical metallic sci fi robots. She hopes the resulting work that forms Trace, will be an uncanny (Unheimlich) and compelling performance—a visitation of sorts.

Read Sarah's Project Journal below to find out more about her plans and progress.

This project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.