-1 Digital Lab-1 Digital Lab

Angelina Kozhevnikova, 2026

Solaris is an artistic research project exploring how conversation might occur with an intelligence that is spatial, distributed, and beyond human comprehension.

Inspired by Stanisław Lem’s Solarian Ocean in the novel Solaris (1961) and by cybernetic thinking, Kozhevnikova produces a prototype of a spatial robotic installation where intelligence is understood as a mode of adaptation, transformation, and emergence rather than as cognition or language.

In Solaris, the robot is not a single object but an environment. It behaves like an alien ocean: forming and reforming internal structures, reacting to individuals and groups, and expressing slower macro-scale rhythms that feel planetary. Some responses are immediate; others unfold over minutes or hours.

The project challenges dominant models of AI. Drawing on cyberneticians such as Beer, Pask, and Bateson, Solaris frames intelligence as adaptive, performative and relational. It asks what it means to encounter a different form of intelligence without simplifying or dominating it. Ultimately, the artwork invites to experience the diversity of intelligence through humility, co-presence, and environmental transformation.

Angelina Kozhevnikova (Animaspace) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring how humans, robots, and environments co-shape one another through interactive installations and performances. Her work challenges dominant technological imaginaries by crafting speculative, open-ended scenarios that rethink autonomy, agency, and control. She is known for relational robotics, human-robot collaboration, and alternative approaches to embodied AI.

Her projects have been supported by major Dutch and European cultural and academic institutions, including the Mondriaan Fund and the Swiss National Science Foundation. They have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, featured by CNN, awarded the Edigma Semibreve Award and AUAS Research of the Year, and nominated for the Lumen Prize.