(currently in post production)
Short film
4k digital, 16mm film, archival material
18:00 min
color, sound
USA, Greece, 2026
In The Wild is a visual poem that searches for another way of sensing and listening to the world around us, beyond the demand to look, capture, and fully recognize. It moves toward lower frequencies, toward what remains subtle, relational, and not immediately legible: a sensory and affective attention that resists the late techno-capitalist demand for efficiency, clarity, and optimization. The work lingers in porosity and slowness, in the trembling space between distance and proximity. It asks what becomes possible when we stop approaching the world as something to classify and control, and begin to meet it through softness, affection, and opacity.
Robotic and AI technologies are built on hard systems of categorization. They sort, classify, name, and predict, while obscuring the structures that sustain them: extraction, invisible labor, and feminized and racialized forms of work. These technologies are far from neutral. These technologies are not neutral. They help shape who is recognized as fully human and who is made available for domination, replacement, or disposal. Though AI often appears immaterial, it is deeply bound to matter: to data centers cooled by vast amounts of water, to mined minerals, to energy grids, to exhausted lands and bodies. The humanoid robot and the mechanical animal are two expressions of the same structure: the Western colonial and patriarchal division between human and nonhuman projected into the machine.
Against this, the wetland appears as a site of resistance: a soft, living collective intelligence that exceeds capture. A liminal ecology that holds complexity without resolving it, where biodiversity, vulnerability, and endurance persist under threat. In robotics and HRI, “in the wild” describes robots leaving the lab and entering so-called real-world environments, even though these experiments remain tightly scripted and measured. In robotics, “in the wild” names the moment a machine leaves the lab, though the world it enters remains tightly scripted. Here, wildness means something else: the unruly relation between humans, technologies, and the-more-than-human where the edges leak into each other.
Filmed between Kalochori in Thessaloniki, the Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles, and the LIRES Robotic Lab at the University of Macedonia, where Dr. Anna-Maria Velentza performs beside the social robots that accompanied her doctoral research in Human-Robot Interaction.
Supported by:
CEMA Center for Ethnographic Media Arts
USC Media Arts & Practice
9th Thessaloniki Biennale “Everything Must Change”