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Describe yourself: Who you are and what you're doing?
I am a digital artist, located in Vienna, Austria. My main interest is the correlation between man and machine, body and technology, and the intersections between the mind and bodies, arts and sciences. There are different artistic approaches in my production ranging from independent art production over collaborative projects development and university research and teaching. At the moment I am working a lot with inflateable objects and on researching the ability of this kind of objects to implement lifelike robotic behaviour.

How did your interest in robots / robotics start?
My first approach to robotics came up because of the question of the possibility of an emotional liaison between me and a machine. There are different indication that this kind of relationship is possible, like some people and their cars or their mobile phones, etc. but because I didn´t have such strong feelings I had the idea to create a machine which generates this feelings in me. At the same time I was very interested in having a tattoo. Researching this field of drawing, I realised, that one must have some kind of confidence to the person penetrating your body with a needle, I assuemed, that the same emotional condition can be reproduced with a tattoo robot. So I created one, what actually took years, but already while developing this robot I realised how interesting this field is. After my selfexperiment with the tatoorobot I actually was convinced how strong the feelings toward a machine can be. So I started to get deeper and deeper and got more and more fascinated.

What kind of actions needs to be done in the community to increase the interest and the awareness of robots / robotics?
I think a deeper contextual and content based discussion as contrasted with technical issues could broaden the interest and open the field in many directions.