The collaborative practice of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders creates encounters with machine performers that nestle themselves into our living environment. Their work Accomplice aims to create an allegory of our world as a complex machinic ecology. As artists, they are interested in the indeterminate, emergent, messy and unstable — a becoming of the work that they cannot control. They set this process in motion by creating the ‘actors’, imbuing them with an adaptive capacity, situating them, preparing the material conditions, … and then letting it unfold. Exploiting the noise inherent in the system as it emerges from the collision of the digital and the physical, they deploy technologies with the aim of opening up new perspectives, and engendering new subjectivities and aesthetic experiences.

Both live and work in Sydney. Petra Gemeinboeck is Director of Postgraduate Research at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW. Rob Saunders is Head of the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.