How robots can make elderly patients happy captured in French artist’s Hong Kong exhibition
- Videos and photos captured by Yves Gellie document hospital and nursing-home patients interacting with a robot that talks, plays games and dances
- In one clip, a woman who usually does not speak chats to the robot about birds and their shared dream of learning to fly
Are robots a threat to the human race? Not if you look at photographs and videos taken by Yves Gellie, who spent two years visiting hospital patients and nursing home residents in France and Belgium to capture their encounters with a particular robot.
In his debut solo show in Hong Kong, “The Age of Robots”, the French artist not only explores our fascination with robots but how communication with machines can be beneficial to the human race.
Describing the videos as an “anticipative documentary”, Gellie says the series foreshadows a future in which humans and machines will grow closer to each other.
“It’s describing the conditions in which people decide to establish a relation with the robot,” he says. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not trying to prove anything. I just explore a [moment] between these two creatures.”
For his project the artist was allowed to make recordings of patients interacting with a robot in these institutions.