Petting Zoo

source: vimeo

Petting Zoo by Minimaforms is speculative robotic environment populated by artificial intelligent creatures that have been designed with the capacity to learn and explore behaviors through interaction with participants. Within this immersive installation interaction with the pets foster human curiosity, play, forging intimate exchanges that are emotive, evolving over time and enabling communication between people and their environment. The installation exhibits life-like attributes through forms of conversational interaction establishing communication with users that are emotive and sensorial. Conceived as an immersive installation environment, social and synthetic forms of systemic interactions allow the pets to engage and evolve their behaviors over time exhibiting features and personalities that are formed through their interactions with the general public. Pets interact and stimulate participation with users through the use of animate behaviors communicated through visual, haptic and aural communication. Pet interactions are stimulated through interaction with human users or between other pets within the population.
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source: vimeo

Minimaforms: was founded in 2002 by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental architecture and design practice that explores projects that provoke and facilitate new means of communication. Our approach examines interactive and evolutionary processes that engage the intimate integration of social and material interaction.

Design is an experiment, continuously evolving and challenging our times, an understanding that proclamations as manifestos are obsolete, so to the attempts to render this world singular and finite. The role of design today is a collective and shared pursuit, the project is one of action and awareness. Participatory models are pursued as means to challenge prescriptive models of command and control. The everyday is enabled to shape and stimulate our architecture machines. Our belief is that communication is the enabling agency at the heart of all forms of interaction, with intelligence being a product of this exchange. Challenging the finite and fixed disciplinary boundaries of today art / design culture, the work ranges from constructing atmospheres to vehicles, attempts to engage and stimulate the built environment and our everyday through participatory and interactive means.