Petra Gemeinboeck is an artist and researcher, working across creative robotics, dance performance and feminist theory. Her arts-led research practice seeks to trouble and expand our relations with machines by exploring questions of embodiment, agency, and performativity. Petra currently is an Australia Research Council Future Fellow in Human-Robot Experience (HRX) and an Associate Professor at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia. She also leads the Austrian Science Fund project ‘Dancing with the Nonhuman’ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Over the past nine years, Petra has developed an innovative, transdisciplinary practice of speculative posthuman dramaturgy, which explores human-robot relationships as more-than-human entanglements arising from difference-in-relation. She is a co-founder of the international Machine Movement Lab (MML) project, alongside her collaborator, A/Prof Rob Saunders (LIACS, Leiden University, NL), which brings together choreography and motion design, creative robotics and machine learning, and posthuman dramaturgy and new materialism.
Petra’s artworks have been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago; International Triennial of New Media Art at National Art Museum China (NAMOC), Beijing; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, AT; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Centre des Arts Enghien at Paris; and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool, UK. Petra was a Finalist in the National New Media Award 2012, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane, AU; received an Honorary Mention at the Live 2011 Grand Prix, Turku, FI, European Capital of Culture for 2011; and was awarded a number of international artist residencies, incl. at Ars Electronica Futurelab, AT. Before moving to Melbourne, Petra was a Senior Research Fellow at Falmouth University, UK, and Senior Lecturer at Art & Design, University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she was Director of Postgraduate Research, and Deputy Director of the Creative Robotics Lab, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA). She has published widely on questions of human-machine agency, the performative potential of movement in human-machine relationships, and virtual reality as a space of embodied negotiation.