Petra Gemeinboeck is an internationally recognised artist and researcher engaging questions of embodiment and agency in human-machine relations. Petra is an ARC Future Fellow (2021-2025) and leads the Human-Robot Experience (HRX) project, which expands human-robot interaction (HRI) through a relational-performative co-design framework. She also leads the FWF PEEK artistic research project ‘Dancing with the Nonhuman’ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2019-2022), and previously led the ARC Discovery Project ‘Performative Body-Mapping’ (2016-2019).
Petra’s transdisciplinary research spans the experimental arts, performance, robotics, AI and new materialism and challenges the sociotechnical discourse around disruptive technologies including Virtual Reality, Surveillance and Social Robotics. Her artworks have been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, US; National Art Museum China (Beijing, CN); NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo, JP); and Ars Electronica Center, AT. Petra also publishes widely on machine performance and new materialist approaches to human-robot interaction. She was lead editor of a special issue on Creative Robotics, The Fibreculture Journal (FCJ28, 2017), the first cross-disciplinary critical inquiry into dominant robotics practices.
Petra was a Finalist in the National New Media Award 2012, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane, and was awarded a number of international artist residencies, incl. at Ars Electronica Futurelab, AT. In 2015, she founded the Machine Movement Lab (MML) project, together with Rob Saunders (Leiden University, NL). Before joining Swinburne, Petra was a Senior Research Fellow at Falmouth University, UK (2018-2019), and Senior Lecturer at Art & Design, University of New South Wales (2009-2020), where she was Director of Postgraduate Research, and Deputy Director of the Creative Robotics Lab, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA).