Fish-Bird: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

This article presents personal observations on the nature of interdisciplinary collaboration drawn from a four-year, art-science collaboration between media artist and researcher Mari Velonaki and roboticists David Rye, Steve Scheding, and Stefan Williams at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. During the four-year period, the team worked on several projects, including the light-reactive artwork Embracement, the interactive robotic installation Fish-Bird, and the interactive installation Circle D: Fragile Balances, comprised of two autonomous handheld objects. The Fish-Bird project, which we use as an example of immersive interdisciplinary collaboration, is an interactive autokinetic artwork that investigates the dialogic possibilities between two robots, in the form of wheelchairs, that communicate with each other and with their audience through movement and written text.