I am an artist and researcher. My work investigates how machines and inert materials can seem alive, applying principles of puppetry and animation to drones, robots, and mechanisms. I have exhibited at ZKM (2017), Papier Fest (2019), and Printemps Numérique (2019). I hold a PhD from Concordia University (Canada) and was a Marie Curie Fellow at UCLouvain (Belgium), where I created Isabella’s Flight, a puppetry system using drones. I am currently a visiting researcher at the University of Brasília, where I investigate the narrative expressiveness of drones.
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What makes something seem alive? Appearance explains little. A robot with a humanoid face can seem less alive than a pillow in the hands of a puppeteer. For the audience, life lies in movement. My work takes place in this territory, between object and character, at the moment when a machine stops looking like a machine.
My main reference is puppetry, an art that has known for centuries how to animate the inanimate. I bring this knowledge to machines, such as drones, robots and mechanisms. Technology does not replace traditional techniques; it expands what they can do.
In Isabella’s Flight (2021–2024), developed at UCLouvain with a Marie Curie fellowship, drones became characters with their own personalities, emotions, and ways of thinking. Before that, I explored the same boundary along other paths. In ROBOT LUDENS, machines waver between seeming alive and dead. Pict.io is a drawing game in which humans and machines create together.
Today, at the University of Brasília and in partnership with the Department of Electrical Engineering, I research the narrative expressiveness of drones through essential movements: how little it takes for a displacement in space to read as intention.
For fifteen years I have developed research-creation projects at the boundary between art, science, and engineering, often as general coordinator and artistic director, in collaboration with engineers, physicists, media researchers, and other artists. At the university, I seek to bring these fields closer together and make them more accessible to underrepresented groups, creating situations in which students from different disciplines learn by making art, games, and prototypes together.