(currently in post produciton)
2026, USA, Greece
In The Wild is a film about looking and looking back. It stages an encounter between humans, robots, and wetland creatures, and lets their edges leak into each other to imagine a queer way of experiencing planetary connection and relation. The film questions, in poetic and enigmatic ways, how our technologies are shaping the ways we are seeing, knowing, and naming the world. It moves through and against the binary of the natural and the artificial, searching for a softness that comes through an unfolding of time, through back and forth, distance and proximity, a kind of vertigo driven by affection and curiosity.
Part of the film remixes an archive of old and new robotic advertisements, where the language keeps repeating itself: control, efficiency, eugenics. Robots appear as tireless helpers, femininity as attendant; automation is a fantasy: a promise of service without bodies, effort without fatigue, care without carers. Through this repetition, the robotic imaginary shows its heteronormative and colonial histories, the same scripts looping through time. Underneath, there is always the question: who performs the invisible labor of care that becomes the ghost in the machine? Who is seen as fully human, and who is not?
In robotics and HRI, “in the wild” describes robots that leave the lab and enter so-called real-world environments. The phrase assumes that everything beyond the lab is a kind of wilderness, and yet these “wild” experiments remain tightly scripted and limited, designed to measure compliance, success, failure. My main collaborator in the film is Dr Anna-Maria Velentza, who is a PhD in Human-Robot Interaction and performs in the lab that she took her doctorate, performing next to the social robots she has been working with for years.
Wildness here is not untouched nature but the unruly relation between humans, robots, and wetlands that refuses to be fully disciplined. I think of this project as post-cinematic softness: slowing down, getting lost a bit, sensing instead of resolving, glitching, non-linear time, the poor image.
Supported by: CEMA Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, USC Media Arts & Practice