Art Gallery Deadline

Submission deadline
January 15, 2027
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RoboSoft 2027 Art Gallery

The Soft Trouble of Wilderness

The RoboSoft Art Gallery returns in 2027, inviting researchers, artists, designers, and makers to explore the intersections between soft robotics, art, technology, and the environments we inhabit.

This year’s exhibition, The Soft Trouble of Wilderness, asks what happens when soft robots leave controlled laboratory settings and enter uncertain, changing, and entangled environments.

“Art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.”

— Robert Smithson, 1971

The exhibition draws inspiration from William Cronon’s critique of wilderness, which challenges the idea of “the wild” as a pristine realm separate from human life, and from Donna Haraway’s concept of natureculture, which questions conventional distinctions between nature and culture, organism and technology.

From this perspective, a robot entering “the wild” is not simply a technological outsider entering nature. It becomes part of environments already shaped by organisms, infrastructures, technologies, histories, materials, and human interventions.

Soft robots make these relationships especially visible: their bodies deform, adapt, sense, and change through interaction with their surroundings.

What might soft robots reveal about the boundaries we draw between nature and technology, organism and machine, the living and the nonliving, autonomy and interdependence?

What We’re Looking For

We welcome works that explore the exhibition theme through artistic, experimental, speculative, or critical approaches to soft robotics.

Submissions may include:

  • Soft robotic sculptures and kinetic artworks
  • Interactive installations and haptic experiences
  • Wearable and body-integrated robotics
  • Bio-inspired or biohybrid works
  • Robots interacting with natural, urban, or human-shaped environments
  • Photography and image-based artworks
  • Experimental video works
  • Speculative or critical explorations of robotics, ecology, embodiment, autonomy, and interdependence
  • Any other work that challenges or expands how we think about softness, technology, and the wild

Works do not need to present a conventional robotic application or scientific result. We especially encourage submissions that use the Gallery to explore ideas that may sit between art, design, robotics, and critical inquiry.

The call is open to everyone, regardless of whether you have submitted a paper to RoboSoft 2027.

Submission Formats

We accept:

  • Three-dimensional artworks
  • Photography and image-based artworks
  • Short video artworks

Submission Requirements

Please include the following with your submission:

  • Title and caption
  • Abstract (maximum 200 words)
  • Video or high-resolution image of the work
  • Space and equipment requirements, where applicable
  • Financial support request, if required

Submission deadline: January 15, 2027
Submission form: https://forms.gle/Ys6PLmcpZpavBAnH8

We invite you to explore what happens when softness leaves the laboratory and encounters the wild.