This talk explores how robotics can embody absence, denial, and speculative presence. Through kinetic systems driven by environmental data, sensors, and generative algorithms, I examine how machines might act as proxies for the dead, stand-ins for protest, or tools for collective dreaming. These works operate at the edge of function and metaphor, where automation intersects with grief, memory, and cultural inertia. By designing machines that perform without clear utility—machines that wait, search, or repeat—I investigate how robotics might serve not just as labor-saving tools, but as poetic instruments that navigate our deepest uncertainties about existence, agency, and the afterlife.
From robots that hold protests, extruders that birth populations and machines that are designed for the dead to operate, Fernando Orellana has collaborated with automation for over twenty years to create transmedia artwork. As a machine designer, a technologist and a user, Orellana has blurred the line between himself and the machine in the creative process. The imagery and narrative that Orellana explores spans a spectrum that includes giving agency to automata, embraces the generatively made, celebrates the wonder of absurdity and is often driven by the universes of the subconscious mind. He has exhibited at a variety of regional, national and international venues, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Speed Art Museum, the Spring Break Art Show and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. He received a Master of Fine Art from The Ohio State University, a Bachelor of Fine Art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a Professor of Digital Art in the Visual Arts Department at Union College. He was born in El Salvador, San Salvador.