Robots for Distant Musicians
Yann Seznec · Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024
This paper presents Robots for Distant Musicians (RFDM), a project developed as part of a residency at the MICA Game Lab in Baltimore, Maryland in 2020-21. A set of musically responsive robots were built that could be accessed through existing online communication platforms, enabling their control from anywhere in the world. This resulted in a series of playful interactions which revealed underlying tensions in the systems that the world came to depend upon during the pandemic. I propose to bring several of the robots from this project to the DIS Playful Experiences Demotrack, allowing users both locally and from around the world to control them through musical sound.