Comfortable and Alive

Elena Knox

Japón-Australia

Comfortable and Alive is a hypnotic induction ritual delivered by an android robot. The robot guides the viewer to imaginatively experience bodily phenomena that are currently beyond the scope of robotic experience. Asserting with confidence a shared perspective on earthly matter, sensation and touch, and levels of consciousness and mood, the machine seems to know what it is to live organically, and to dream.

Twinned in a yin-yang pattern evocative of a "natural" balance of powers, the robot guides the human through a blend of artificial intelligence, ancestral knowledge and snake oil.

Will we need such rituals, overseen by interconnected machines, after planetary collapse, or when all physical and spiritual experience is networked and situated online, excluding our biological bodies? Is this pleasant trance therapeutic, a hijacking, or a convergence of both? The robots' will to power is something that many humans anticipate and, above all, fear. Human beings become automatons. Relinquishing control in a user-friendly future.