Header image: PluShe: Programmable Dynamic Textures on Textile Surface, by Ciccy Lyu, Miguel Bruns, Albert Schenning, Xue Wan, and Amy Winters.

The Poetics of Softness

This exhibition takes its name from Max Kozloff’s 1967 essay The Poetics of Softness, in which softness is framed as a resistance to the rigid and enduring conventions of sculpture. In a similar way, the works gathered here position softness as a counterpoint to the rigid, controlled paradigms that have long defined robotics.

Softness is often understood as a material quality: compliant, flexible, yielding. In robotics, this frequently manifests itself as silicone skins, inflatable bodies, or deformable structures. Yet the works gathered here propose a broader, more radical interpretation. Softness is not only what something is made of, but how it behaves—how it senses, adapts, breathes, and relates.

Across the exhibition, softness emerges through diverse material and structural strategies. Droplets levitate and move through vibration, structures achieve flexibility through geometry rather than compliant matter, and textile interfaces morph through embedded material intelligence. Crochet, liquid crystal elastomers, fluid systems, and waste-derived bioceramics expand the material palette, while many works draw on biological systems—engaging with principles of movement, growth, and adaptation—to produce lifelike motion.

Softness is also translated across different physical and sensory forms. Stories are translated into tactile surfaces, signals become pressure, color, or movement, and sound is both sensed and produced. These works operate across modalities, transforming text, vibration, and environmental input into embodied, material behavior.

Finally, softness unfolds through interaction. Garments register physiological signals, interfaces respond to touch and proximity, and systems adapt to the presence of those around them. Many are intimately entangled with the human body—sensing, supporting, and extending it—blurring distinctions between control and response, human and machine.

Together, these works suggest that softness is not a fixed property, but a condition that emerges through interaction —between bodies, environments, and machines. In this sense, the exhibition resonates with Karen Barad’s assertion that “matter is not a thing but a doing.

Descriptions have been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.

Three Dimensional Artworks:

Safe & Sound

Romario Akiki, Yunlin Jiang, Dylan Read, Shun Huang, Lai Jiang
University of the Arts London (UAL)

A sound-reactive robotic creature that breathes and moves in response to loudness and sudden sonic change. Inspired by lived experiences of threat, the piece explores how non-human form, rhythm, and motion can evoke empathy through vulnerability. Its breathing illustrates the threat level through its rhythm, while a tentacle-like form gives physical form to the portrayed emotion. 

Waterphase

Chaucer Xie
Tama Art University, Graduate School of Design, Integrated Design (M2)

By applying controlled vibration, water droplets levitate and move across the water’s surface. The work visualizes water’s latent dynamism, blurring the boundary between animate and inanimate matter. Rather than locating softness in a fabricated soft body, the installation presents it as a behavioral regime that emerges through material properties, tuned boundary conditions, and distributed control.

To Touch a Story

Carolina Silva-Plata, Abraham Villavicencio-Carmona, Miguel Silva-Plata, Stefan Escaida, Ruben Fernandez
University of Chile & University of O’Higgins

To Touch a Story is an interactive soft robotic installation that transforms literary narratives into tactile and visual experiences. Through emotional analysis of text, stories are translated onto a modular soft robotic surface, where variations in stiffness and color express primary and secondary emotions. By combining soft robotics, affective computing, and embodied interaction, the installation invites participants to experience storytelling through touch—feeling emotions rather than only reading them.

Quiet Companion

Junying Zhou
Royal College of Art, London, UK (PhD Design Research)

Quiet Companion is a wearable soft robotic garment that responds to emotional tension with gentle pressure, offering non-verbal support in moments when human touch feels difficult. The work reframes softness as a capacity for emotional care. As the garment activates, its inflated latex core and rigid 3D-printed spikes transform from a defensive outward form to a softer configuration, suggesting emotional easing and recovery.

Tsuzumi-mon: Soft Fabric Origami Robot

Lois Liow
CSIRO Robotics

Inspired by Kanazawa’s Tsuzumi-mon, the drum gate that welcomes visitors to the city, this work explores the intersection of soft robotics and traditional craft.  Its two vertical pillars are made of fabric origami hyperboloids lined internally with 3D-printed rigid panels, enabling repeated cycles of motion while preserving structural form. The roof is finished with gold leaf, paying tribute to Kanazawa’s long history of gold leaf production. The work frames contemporary robotic fabrication as an evolution of craft—one that augments, rather than erases, the presence of the human hand.

Fragmentations of Unity

Yutaro Kyono, So Kanno, Takuro Yonezawa, Tadashi Okoshi, Jin Nakazawa
Keio University Nakazawa-Okoshi Lab,  Aichi University of the Arts,  Nagoya University Kawaguchi Lab.

A swarm of suspended robots investigates how varying gaze angles—from authoritative overhead viewpoints to empathetic eye-level contact—trigger deep-seated, instinctual reactions. The robots perceive and react to viewers, creating a dynamic interplay of “expectation and betrayal”.The work challenges conventional HRI metrics such as cuteness, proposing a different framework for understanding artificial presence in three-dimensional space.

Hooked: Threading Touch to Light

Juliette Hars
EPFL (CREATE Lab)

This hand-crocheted garment functions as a fully soft, wearable sensing body: it feels proximity and pressure, answering to touch with a gentle glow that deepens as the pressure increases, transforming textile into an expressive, interactive surface. Conductive thread is integrated directly into the crochet patterns, forming capacitive touch and pressure sensors capable of detecting contact, intensity, and location. Light is used as a form of emotional feedback, softly illuminating the garment to evoke calm, warmth, wholeness, and joy.

Undulation

Hiroki Minami, Matthew Gardiner, Tomohiro Tachi
The University of Tokyo, Ars Electronica Futurelab

Undulation is inspired by the kinematics of rigid origami and centers on wave-like, organic motions reminiscent of marine life. Combining textile hinges with thin 3D-printed plastic panels, the work achieves lightweight and precise folding motion through a non-developable one-degree-of-freedom rigid origami structure derived from the Bricard linkage. When forces of differing phases are transmitted from the left and right sides, a smooth wave travels from one end of the structure to the other. Though composed of rigid elements, it generates a softness in movement, revealing how origami principles can produce fluid, lifelike behavior in robotics.

PluShe: Programmable Dynamic Textures on Textile Surface

Ciccy Lyu, Miguel Bruns, Albert Schenning, Xue Wan, Amy Winters
Eindhoven University of Technology

PluShe is a robotic textile interface that explores texture as an expressive medium. Woven with liquid crystal elastomer fibres, the surface slowly breathes and transforms over time, enabling robotic textures through a dialogue with the material’s own intelligence. By animating texture rather than form alone, the work proposes robotic expressivity beyond efficiency- and affordance-driven models of development.

The Breath of a GRACE

S.G. van Dipten, B. Lau, D. Chan, E.L. Doubrovski, R.B.N. Scharff
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

The Breath of a GRACE explores the tension between human presence and natural fragility through a constellation of soft robotic sculptures inspired by alveoli and blossoming flowers. Each “Grace” subtly breathes, contracts, or expands in response to local stimuli—sound, motion, and proximity—translating environmental agitation into movement. Based on the GRACE geometry (GeometRy-based Actuators that Contract and Elongate, De Pascali et al. 2022), and fabricated in multi-material resins, the installation invites reflection on softness not as weakness, but as an adaptive and mediating force between technology, humanity, and nature.

Mechanical Bloom

Hemma Philamore, Alix Partridge, Calum Gillespie, Adrienne Hart, Ana Rajcevic, Charlie Hope, Star Holdon
University of Bristol & Neon Dance

Mechanical Bloom uses cable-driven actuation to produce organic motion designed to be puppeteered by motion tracking of the human body. The work brings together choreography, telepresence, and soft robotic performance. It treats motion not simply as actuation, but as a shared expressive language between human and machine. 

Pulse

Adrienne Hart, Hemma Philamore, Sebastian Reynolds

Pulse is a playful and experimental installation inspired by the nerve endings that allow us to sense when hair is moved or touched. Drawing on principles of artificial whisker sensing, the work consists of a series of small tiles, each containing a single artificial “hair.” These responsive elements detect movement and touch, translating interaction into sound composed by Sebastian Reynolds in collaboration with community groups in and around Swindon. Pulse was commissioned for the Festival of Tomorrow 2026 in Swindon.

Embracing Clay

Christine Braganza
University of Bristol

Wet clay readily yields to rigid contact, yet can also be easily damaged. Using soft robotic tools designed to mimic the human hand, these three pieces apply gentle force to deform hand-thrown ceramic cylinders into organic forms without structural failure. Rather than replacing the maker, the soft robots extend the maker’s hands, keeping creative control with the human. 

Myo-morphologic Canine Limb

Yuta Ishikawa
Institute of Science Tokyo

Based on a CT image of a beagle’s left hindlimb, this work replicates muscle shapes in silicone rubber. Only the gastrocnemius muscle contains seven embedded McKibben artificial muscles that can be actuated. While some muscles were omitted due to fabrication constraints, most were carefully arranged based on anatomical knowledge of their biological origins and insertions. 

A Fawn-like Robot Made of Beads

Tomoe Maeta

Inspired by musculoskeletal beauty, this fawn robot combines tensegrity with jamming transitions through beads and wires. Rather than locating intelligence in external computation, the work explores what it calls “anatomical intelligence”—the capacity of a body to organize motion through structural constraints. It captures life in the effort of standing, presenting softness as stiffness as controllers embedded in the body itself. 

Phantom Resonance

Yael Zekaria
University of Bristol and the University of the West of England

Play this artificial muscle! Your proximity determines how it contracts and relaxes. When you step away, the muscle freezes, preserving a memory of your final interaction and waiting for the next person to breathe life back into its synthetic fibres. Reimagining the puborectalis muscle as an instrument, the piece invites viewers to conduct contraction and release through embodied proximity.

_heartistic

Ellis Capp, Alexia Le Gall
Soft Robotic Lab, Oxford Robotics Institute · SMBLab, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

This sculpture explores how simple components can combine to generate complex, life-like motion. Movement emerges not through elaborate control or intelligence, but through the orchestration of mechanical interactions, timing, and material response. heartistic foregrounds the elegant simplicity at the heart of soft robotics.

Claviiiiiier

Felix Vanneste, Samuel Bianchini
INRIA & École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris

Six small black modules resemble the keys of a musical keyboard. At regular intervals, a key lifts, bends, and twists before settling back down with a tap, while the visible pneumatic system below produces resonant sounds as air is released like a new kind of wind instrument. Thanks to these small artificial muscles, each outfitted with foam elements whose structures have been programmed to dictate their distortion, Claviiiiiier composes using material and movement, operating somewhere between instrument, installation, and technology demonstration.

Photographic Artworks:

Synthetic Life

Dumbor Debeeh
Afro Futurism

Synthetic Life explores the delicate intersections between nature and machine, asking what it means to nurture, belong, and evolve. A robotic mother duck guides her organic ducklings through a lush, green pond. The ducklings follow the robot unbothered, reflecting trust and innocence, suggesting a possible harmony between the biological and the synthetic. The work  raises questions about artificial intelligence, caregiving, and emotional authenticity and imagines a future ecology in which artificial intelligence and organic life are not separate, but intertwined.

From Shell to Skeleton

Naresh Kumar Thanigaivel
Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Eggshell waste is transformed into bioceramic robotic limbs, closing a material loop from food discard to embodied motion. This quadruped robot visualizes circular fabrication, in which biological remnants become the structural backbone of soft-rigid machines. Rather than presenting softness solely through deformable actuation, this work challenges conventional interpretations by framing softness as an ethical and ecological condition, one rooted in regeneration, reuse, and coexistence with natural systems. The robot becomes both artifact and argument: a machine that embodies care through its material lineage.

Seahorse Inspired Tensegrity Manipulator in a Sea of Tensegrity Structures

Lukas Lehmann, Luca Kapitza, David Herrmann, Kilian Mittnacht
OTH Regensburg

A seahorse-inspired tendon-driven manipulator combines logarithmic, conventional, and tensegrity architectures to enable adaptive multi-finger grasping and tunable compliance. Drawing on the seahorse tail, the design balances stiffness and flexibility through compressed members and tensioned elements. The work presents softness not merely as material compliance, but as a structural property emerging from prestress, modularity, and dexterous interaction.

Prestressed Softness

David Herrmann, Lukas Lehmann, Luca Kapitza
OTH Regensburg

A prestressed tensegrity network that adapts its form through internal forces. Though geometrically simple and planar, the structure reveals softness as an emergent property of tension, repetition, and constraint. The work suggests that adaptability and gentle interaction can arise from rigid components when arranged through architectural and mechanical intelligence.

Silico Ghost

Graziella Bedenik, Antonio Morales, Supun Pieris
Queen’s University

This work captures the spectral motion of a jellyfish-inspired robot, its dyed currents tracing an unseen rhythm. It highlights the beauty of robotics and fluid dynamics in an otherworldly underwater dance, transforming a scientific process into an artistic exploration of biomimicry and the unknown. The title merges the synthetic and the organic; “silico” referencing the robot’s engineered materials, and “ghost” evoking its phantom-like presence in the water. The piece invites viewers to question where technology ends and nature begins, hinting at machines that move as seamlessly as life itself.

Urban Siren

Carolina Silva-Plata
University of Chile

Urban Siren explores a soft robotic auricular wearable in which wire-reinforced folds and inflatable modules suggest listening, attention, and presence. Inspired by the fin of the lion fish, the piece treats softness as material, structure, and expressive language rather than as task-oriented actuation alone. A hybrid body emerges in everyday urban space, poised between wearability, perception, and speculative embodiment. Positioned on the human ear and worn within an everyday urban environment, the work reframes the mythological siren not as a fantasy creature, but as a perceptive body navigating contemporary space.

Soft Lumen

Ciccy Lyu, Miguel Bruns, Albert Schenning, Xue Wan, Amy Winters
Eindhoven University of Technology

By weaving optical fibres into the textile structure, this work transforms light into a tangible material that can be programmed through design. The glowing patterns act as embedded triggers that activate UV-responsive materials. In this way, the textile becomes a kind of physical program, spatially determining how the soft system moves and morphs.

MAPWORMS – Mimicking Adaptation and Plasticity in WORMS

Ilaria Cedrola
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna – BioRobotics Institute

Inspired by the shape-morphing mechanisms of the unsegmented marine worm Phascolosoma stephensoni, this magnetic-responsive soft structure translates biological fluid-structure interactions into an engineered system. As in its natural counterpart, localized compression of a fluid-filled vesicle is converted into the linear deployment of an internal proboscis. By abstracting an evolutionary strategy into a controllable soft robotic architecture, this work highlights how nature’s hidden mechanics can be reinterpreted as functional, adaptive design.

Spark of Color

Manvi Saxena, Yihao Geng, Jason Brown, Daniel Newman, Cameron Aubin
University of Michigan

A tiny controlled explosion inflates the soft membrane of a microcombustion actuator, sending colorful, carefully arranged water droplets skyward. The actuator measures just 8 mm in diameter, while the depicted high-speed time-lapse spans only 3 milliseconds.The work challenges the assumption that soft actuators must be slow or gentle, showing instead how softness can also be fast, forceful, and explosive.

Soft Interfaces

Tessa van Abkoude
Material Aesthetics Lab, TU Eindhoven

These soft interfaces breathe and shift in silence. Using electroosmotic pumps, thin surfaces sense and respond through delicate shape changes, offering gestures of presence and intent beyond familiar modes of interaction. Positioned between interface and soft robotics, the work proposes an alternative vision of interaction where technology recedes into material behaviour, and softness becomes a medium for subtle communication, intent, and embodied experience.

Nature Speaks Through Machines

Chapa Sirithunge
University of Cambridge

This work presents a gender-neutral human face cast in silicone as a physical interface through which robots can communicate while remaining grounded in the natural world. Rather than relying on digital avatars or screens, the piece explores how soft, tactile materials carry robotic intent through subtle deformation, texture, and contact. Silicone, chosen for its skin-like compliance and responsiveness, translates robotic signals into gestures that feel organic and emotionally legible. By embedding communication within a touchable form, the work challenges the digitalisation of human–robot interaction and asks how machines might remain materially connected to human sensory experience. The face’s neutrality invites projection and reflection on shared embodiment. Positioned between sculpture and interface, the piece proposes a future in which robots express themselves through soft, bio-inspired forms rather than abstraction.