Hexis
A duet between a dancer and a robot.
If a robot and a human could dance, how would they move? During my master’s program at IAAC in Barcelona—a hub for advanced architecture, interaction design, digital fabrication, and material research—I became fascinated by the school’s nearly unused 6-axis robot. I watched how it snapped from point to point, twisting through space in unexpectedly corporeal ways. Inspired by robotic choreography from studios like Bot & Dolly, my curiosity shifted from simply interacting with the machine to choreographing a duet between a dancer and a robot.
The result was Hexis, a research project exploring the aesthetic possibilities of robotic movement. Modern robots are typically constrained by efficiency, repetition, and precision, but Hexis sought to liberate that vocabulary. The performance and short film feature a duet between a dancer and a Kuka five-axis robot used in car manufacturing. I created a movement alphabet—phrases for the dancer to embody and sequences for the robot to execute. Separated by a perforated screen, illuminated by a robot-mounted light, and enveloped in fog, the two figures move together in a shared atmospheric space, offering a new way to experience the machines that shape our world.
Hexis won Best Experimental Film at the Frozen Film Festival (2015)
