Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou | Soft Intelligences

“Soft Intelligences” is an ongoing interdisciplinary project merging film, performance, robotics, XR play, and experimental documentary practices to reimagine human/robot/planetary interaction. It is an attempt to soften the rigidity, cleanness, and accelerationist logic often associated with robotic technologies and propose a new language of relationality with the human and the more-than-human world. It proposes a speculative place that is soft and wild, a space of expansive, untamed safety and tenderness where humans, nonhuman animals, and machines co-create ecologies of collective flourishing—entangled through care, response-ability, and radical kinship. This place bridges the binary between the technological and the natural, the rational and the emotional, in intimate and unexpected ways.

Queer feminist, critical race, and decolonial studies have shown us that technology is not neutral—it reflects the values, assumptions, and worldviews of those who build it. Rather than framing robots as tools or threats, this work explores them as companions in creating ecological sanctuaries and soft technologies. What does our relationship with robotic others reveal about our humanity and societal values? Do the ways we design, program, and engage with robots reflect how we treat the most vulnerable among us? Do emotion and intelligence go hand in hand?

This installation explores these questions in poetic and caring ways. It employs collaboration and interdisciplinarity as political tools to envision new worlds, new relationships, and new becomings together with others. Part documentary, part fiction, part installation, part video performance— it begins in the lab(s), exploring radical relationships between humans and robotic others, and expands into unexpected places through speculative, performative, and symbiotic ways. First, experimental documentary filming involves intimate interviews with queer, femme, and BIPOC robotic engineers and hackers whose alternative ways of engaging with robots transform harsh robotic labs into spaces of tenderness. Second, performances feature human collaborators and a quadruped robot dog wearing a costume inspired by wildlife, which softens and hybridizes its form.

Robots are no longer distant entities of a sci-fi future—they are here, woven into our daily lives. They navigate our streets, enter our homes, and shape our interactions. It is imperative to imagine and create alternatives to the dominant narratives shaped by Silicon Valley, the military, and Hollywood—forces that have long defined robotic entities as tools for productivity, obedient systems built to serve, or vessels for hypersexualized, heteronormative fantasies. In an increasingly technologized capitalist world that prioritizes progress, efficiency, and control, softness is portrayed as a source of trouble, mistrust, and failure. In Tsagkaropoulou’s practice, softness becomes a mode of resistance that unsettles the hard architectures of rigid systems and exposes the racial, colonial, and gendered hierarchies embedded within them. In this work, softness is amplified through acts of technological fragilization and storytelling for earthly survival, forming a poetic invitation to live differently with one another and find our place in the family of the world—through gestures of feral tenderness.