Accomplice features an infestation of autonomous robots — a colony of curious, social machines hidden within the Artspace gallery walls — that function as an allegory of our world’s complex machinic ecology. Each robot is equipped with a motorised punch, a camera, and a microphone to assist in the complete transformation of the surrounding environment. Collectively, these robots explore, learn, play and conspire by knocking against the wall, producing holes and patterns that mark the evolution of their social development.

Accomplice was presented at ISEA 2013 part of a suite of projects focused on experimental use of mechanisation (in particular robotics) in both representational construction and in furthering the impulse for deconstruction, even destruction. Collectively the projects presented both live processes and outcomes associated with robotics within contemporary practice, ranging across the construction and presentation of images and painted forms through to the erasure of architectural form and alteration of material structures.