Forming / Moving / Making – Meaning

Jussi Ängeslevä

Artist and Designer

Location: Stanford Robotics Center, Packard Electrical Engineering Bldg, Basement

Abstract

In this talk I will discuss strategies through which robotics can bring meaning to spatial communication and public art. Over the last two decades, the renaissance of the physical has brought pixels off the screen: the meaning in the motion, the cultural embeddings in physical form, and the robotic capabilities of manipulating matter can be harnessed for spatial storytelling and artistic expression. I will walk through these approaches via my own kinetic artworks and robotics research, populating showrooms, public space, and cultural institutions: robots that make bespoke things, kinetic sculptures where meaning lives between material presence and movement, and works where the robot itself stands as a metaphor for technology.

This will be the backdrop for my artist residency at SRC for the coming weeks.

Bio: 

Artist and Designer Jussi Ängeslevä is a designer, media artist, and educator working at the intersection of emerging technology, robotics, and spatial experience. Trained in Computer Related Design at the Royal College of Art, he began his career in the Palpable Machines research group at Media Lab Europe, exploring embodied interaction and haptics. As Creative Director at ART+COM Studios in Berlin, he has spent over two decades guiding kinetic and immersive installations — from museum storytelling to bespoke robotic sculpture — that communicate meaning through motion, material, and interaction. He is an Honorary Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and a former visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London, where his teaching and research explore digital materiality and embodied interaction at the meeting point of aesthetic narrative and technological insight. His work has received international recognition from the Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, BAFTA, the Art Directors Club of Europe, D&AD, Ars Electronica, and ZKM. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Stanford's Robotics Center.