 My name is Matthew Gardner. I'm an artist and researcher based in Linz at the Ars Electronica Future Lab. I've been interested for a very long time in the role of origami and of folding more specifically and of the intersection of that with robotics and technology. It began around 2004 and I coined the term Ori botics. Ori meaning fold, robotics being short for robotics. And it was an attempt to make self-folding materials. And I began with a small kit of Lego Mindstorms robotics. And this was one of these very early prototypes. As I developed my practice, as I went from grants, excess to grants, excess, each time I was able to evolve the process. And in 2010 I came to the Ars Electronica Future Lab as a resident artist thanks to the Australia Council for the Arts. And during that time I was very interested in what I could do with new technologies. New technologies like 3D printing, technologies like laser cutting. And I was interested in how I could make a work that would last, whereas my first work lasted one week. It went into the gallery and broke down and the robots had so much tension in them that they kind of pulled themselves apart. And obviously if you're a designer of a kind of life form, this is not a very good thing. So each step along the way was looking at ways in, one is reducing stress in the mechanisms, but also reducing stress in the materials. And so one of the innovative things that I undertook during my residency here was to investigate materials other than paper. And so this is one of the robots that I prototyped and built and made 50 times during my residency. And what I did was discovered that looking at dressmaking techniques and a technique called plies, which means to fold, but normally means to fold fabrics. And so you would often find this technique in women's dresses, so pleated dresses or very extravagant folds. And it's a simple process whereby you lay a sheet of fabric between two sheets of paper and you fold those up all together and you cook it and that sets the memory of the material. And so this memory that's been encoded into this fabric here is extremely durable. This is a program that's been written into the material that is permanent. The same goes for paper. However paper, as soon as you scrunch it or do anything violent to it, it loses that memory. Actually what you do is you add new information to the fold, you corrupt it and you change its structure. But whereas this material can withstand all of these deflections and deformations while keeping this beautiful structure. And it's very much this structure that I've been interested in and this folding mechanisms and the symmetry of the folds, but also the mechanisms. My current research now is to look at how we can find folds in nature at all scales of life. So both starting from the nano scale looking at protein folding up to origami scale which is like this at this scale too. Textures that you can add to architecture that you would find in interior design all the way up to buildings that are made with folded materials. Finally out into the outer space, so there's been several projects that have looked at folding to compress something very small, put it into a rocket ship and send it up into outer space. And then once it's in outer space it then unfolds in no gravity. And so this is kind of gives you like folding in space in outer space in a vacuum with no gravity would give you new possibilities that don't exist. Suddenly the weight of the material has no effect and you could design objects that go beyond that. And finally even the shape of the universe has been theorized to be like a folded shape. So this is like the current area of research and where it goes on and impacts. So back to a little bit about this work. Inside this robot here is a small sensor and it's an ultrasonic sensor and the way it functions is that as you come closer to the robot it opens and when you go away from it it closes up and at the same time a color shift occurs. There's small LEDs inside each of the petals. All of the components have been carefully designed down to within 100 microns in accuracy so that all of them have been 3D printed and they were 3D printed. It took about 1,800 hours inside the Ars Electronica Fab Lab. So just non-stop 3D printing for three months. So day and night this machine did not rest until it had produced 50 sets of these parts. Inside this body here is a custom designed circuit board designed by my father Ray Gardner kind of electronics guru who has the ability to make industrial control systems. So this inside here is a brain. There's a power and network cable here that goes back to a central hub where it gets power but also feeds onto a network. So signals of proximity from each flower are sent back to a network and when you get close enough to one flower in particular that causes a ripple effect, a kind of a message that you've got close enough and that the whole installation then goes in a wave like a pebble being dropped into a pond.