Associate Professor Petra Gemeinboeck

Biography

Petra Gemeinboeck is an artist and researcher whose creative practice seeks to expand and trouble our relations with machines by exploring questions of embodiment, agency, and performativity. Petra is an ARC Future Fellow (2021-2025), leading the Human-Robot Experience (HRX) project that aims to expand human-robot interaction (HRI) through a relational-performative co-design framework. She also leads the FWF PEEK artistic research project ‘Dancing with the Nonhuman’ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2019-2022), and previously led the ARC Discovery Project ‘Performative Body-Mapping’ (2016-2019). Petra’s research into human-robot relationships unfolds a speculative, posthuman dramaturgy, bringing together choreography and motion design, design anthropology, enactive cognition, machine learning and engineering, to attend to more-than-human entanglements arising from difference-in-relation. Her artworks have been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago; National Art Museum China (Beijing); NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo); and Ars Electronica Center, AT. She was a Finalist in the National New Media Award 2012, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane, and was awarded a number of international artist residencies, incl. at Ars Electronica Futurelab, AT. In 2015, she founded the Machine Movement Lab (MML) project, together with Rob Saunders (Leiden University, NL). Before joining Swinburne, Petra was a Senior Research Fellow at Falmouth University, UK (2018-2019), and Senior Lecturer at Art & Design, University of New South Wales (2009-2020), where she was Director of Postgraduate Research, and Deputy Director of the Creative Robotics Lab, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA).