"A New Class of Artifact?"

In this talk, we'll explore the concepts of material agency and hybridity in biohybrid robotics, a field that has been underexplored in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Biohybrid robotics incorporates principles from synthetic biology, tissue engineering and robotics engineering to design and create 'living robots'. Imaginaries of hybridity are prominent in the field, as biohybrid robots exist at the hybrid interface of organic living material and inorganic components while being neither fully living nor fully robotic, designed by both AI and humans. Beren's work investigates questions of to what extent the field is pushing traditional boundaries of existing knowledge and what this means for the future of human-machine and human-more-than-human collaborations. She will show how biohybrid robotics opens up a debate about new forms of agency that are still in the making, as biohybrid robotics researchers attempt to create programmable and adaptable machines that possess their own agency.

About the speaker

Beren Sekerci is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s STIS department. Her Wellcome Trust funded doctoral research explores the social dimensions of biohybrid robotics, particularly focusing on the concepts of material agency and hybridity.

Image credit: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel, detail) (c1495-1505. Nacional del Prado, Madrid.