visual artist and filmmaker
Completed: 2026
A Film by Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou
Written, Directed, and Edited by
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou
Performed by
Anna-Maria Velentza, Mochi Georgiou
Cinematography
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, David De Rozas, Kleitos Kyriakides
Quadruped Robot Operation
Huntrezz Janos
Music Composition and Sound Design by
Aliki Leftherioti
Special Thanks
Holly Willis, Larry Gottheim, John Threat, Nadja Argyropoulou, LIRES – Lab of Informatics and Robotics in Education and Society, iMAP Media Arts & Practice
All archival footage used according to the Doctrine of Fair Use Section 107 of the US Copyright Act
Archival Footage
Includes archival footage from BBC, British Pathé, Prelinger Archives, and more.
Produced at
The Center For Ethnographic Media Arts, University of Southern California
2026
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 appears beside the social robots that accompanied her doctoral research in HRI.
Still Images
Director Statement
I made In the Wild from a tension I could not resolve: a fascination with robots as unresolved bodies, and a frustration with the rigid language of capitalist progress through which they are imagined. The film began with a question: what does the way we build and treat robotic bodies reveal about how the same systems treat those they render most vulnerable? I perceive it as a queer film, although it does not depend on an explicitly queer narrative or on representation as its primary language. Its queerness lies in how it moves across unstable relations: between human and machine, animality and technology, intimacy and estrangement. It is an attunement to whatever exceeds classification—to an unsanctioned affection, a body that cannot be read correctly, an image that shimmers at the edge of recognition. Bodies of water and bodies without organs that are porous, desiring, mortal, unable to optimize their way out of dependence. Queerness, for me, begins there, as a way of remaining open to relation without mastering what we encounter.
I wanted to challenge the systems that decide what intelligence and emotionality should look like, which bodies are useful, and whose labor can disappear beneath the fantasy of automation. The robot becomes a surface onto which society projects an ideal body: tireless, rational, obedient, always ready to perform. Yet robots hesitate, fall, break down, and require maintenance. These moments do not interest me as failures of technology, but as cracks in the fantasy that any body can be fully self-sufficient.
The archive of robot advertisements allowed me to approach this fantasy through time. I do not use these images as evidence of a completed past, but as material that makes time stutter. A 1950s vacuuming robot meets the sleek bow of a contemporary domestic humanoid, folding past and present into one another. What appears is not a history of progress, but the return of the same promise in new skins: the compliant servant, the perfected body, labor made invisible so that autonomy can appear seamless. The future is haunted by what it claims to have surpassed.
Against this hard, frictionless language of optimization, I approach softness as a cinematic method. Softness is not passivity or mere aesthetics. It is the right to remain unfinished, to refuse usefulness, to break down, to be helped up, and to retain something that cannot be extracted or translated into data. Cinematically, softness enters through duration, porosity, and a willingness to let the image be changed by accident.
The wetland offered me an ethical and cinematic form for this. Its boundaries continually move, and bodies are continuously made through exchange. Wetland time does not progress cleanly toward an outcome; it accumulates, decomposes, returns, and transforms. The film follows this movement, allowing relations to emerge without pushing them toward conclusion. Here, softness does not erase agony; it passes through vulnerability, endurance, and change.
This approach also shaped my collaboration with my friend Dr. Anna-Maria Velentza, a researcher in Human–Robot Interaction. She is not an actress playing a scientist; her body carries years of knowledge, repetition, care, and intimacy with the robots beside her. I did not want to approach the laboratory from the outside or turn it into a theatrical set. Together, we allowed research to loosen into choreography, letting programmed gestures become encounters made through gazes, touch, hesitation, and play. Through her presence, the affective and often feminized labor surrounding technological systems begins to shimmer into view.
Working between digital images, archival fragments, a robot-dog camera POV, and the unstable glitches and errors produced by an old Krasnogorsk-3 16mm camera, allowed the filmmaking process itself to lose control. Its mechanical limitations demanded patience and a more attentive way of filming, open to material failure and to what could not be planned. I do not use opacity to hide an answer, but to protect the possibility that a body—or an image—might remain irreducible. The film does not attempt to humanize the robot. Instead, it asks what kind of humanity we encode into our machines, what forms of life that image excludes, and what other worlds might become possible if we learned to build and relate otherwise.