Robots are designed to play a significant role in everyday life as technological cohabitants. People tend to attribute human characteristic to the robots and face them as living organisms. Based on the ideas of cyborg and animism, we don’t understand robots as mere tools, but as creative entities, capable of expanding the role they are given by their human creators. TIRESIAS is a non-anthropomorphic entity that moves naturally trying to develop an equal dynamic partnership with the human co-performer. The work is based on the blind prophet Tiresias, who creates his own identities, escaping the distinctions of man and woman. TIRESIAS explores the ways in which we can avoid dualities of human and non-human entities and find new interesting relationships between different actors.

Tiresias is a blind figure from the Greek mythology, who can ‘see’ into oneself and find self-knowledge. It is not a man neither a woman, but an entity which tries to find its own identity. This installation speaks from the side of a tentacular machine. Tentacular beings explore the world and their self through touch. But the palm has not the means of covering the whole of the truth. The sensory perceptions can lead to misinterpretations, as there are various aspects of truth and limited sensory experience. Machines can sense properties of their environment. TIRESIAS is a self-actualising machine that tries to understand the properties of itself. The knowledge that TIRESIAS infers is reflected in the environment in the form of sound-waves as an approach to materialise the machines’ perception about itself. At the same time, an unusual duet co-performs for self-actualization through sensory experience. They explore the blurry lines between human and non-human, between the physical and the mechanical.

The exploration of kinetic mechanisms led to a mechanism called the "elephant trunk robot" or "continuum robot". There are different variations of this mechanism, but they all have in common that they are highly manoeuvrable and consist of multiple segments which are connected to motors to make the mechanism move in a certain direction. In conclusion, the mechanism can be used within the context of auto-interactions in a way that the mechanism physically touches itself.

The construction consists of 7 circular joined plywood disks, in which are attached 3 motors, 3 drivers, 1 power supply and 1 Arduino, and a flexible tentacular construction of 14 segments, made of 14 circular compression springs, 27 3D printed plastic joints and 14 acrylic disks. One thread is attached from the spool that is connected in each motor and it comes all the way through the construction, ending up to different segments of the tentacular structure. The size of the installation is 40x200x40cm and the weight is estimated about 15kg. It is attached in the ceiling using a projector mount, making it very stable. This project is developed using communication interfaces between systems, like the use of OSC and the transmission via UDP in a network, that makes the spine moves in a choreographic way.