Humans and machines increasingly imagine, build, and create together. Yet communication between them often remains one-directional. Humans give instructions, and machines execute them, with little space for interpretation, response, or change. Sybil, an interactive robotic installation at Ars Electronica 2026, explores what a more reciprocal exchange between humans and machines could look like, and what this might mean for the future of design and construction.
Sybil follows a human gesture as it moves through different layers of technological translation. The title refers to the ancient sibyls, oracles who interpreted human questions and returned them in transformed form. Visitors are invited to draw traces into a sand floor using sticks provided at the installation. Cameras and sensors capture these gestures and translate them into robotic toolpaths. A robotic arm then uses these paths to spray a mixture of soil and seeds onto a suspended net structure. At the same time, a feedback system returns aspects of the gesture through sound, image, and data, making the translation process perceptible. Over the five days of the Ars Electronica festival, the sprayed traces begin to germinate and gradually transform the net into a living surface.
Sybil asks what happens to meaning through each step of this process. A mark in sand is not the same as a robotic trajectory, and a robotic trajectory is not the same as the biological growth that follows. In relation to the festival theme Negotiating Humanity – Future Begins, Sybil understands the future not as something that can simply be predicted, but as something that emerges through the exchange between human intention, computational translation, robotic action, and biological growth.