As soon we step into ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo, and start passing by the animals Ian Ingram is in his element. The various animals trigger him into explaining stunningly diverse details about biological and technological beings. Whether it is their physiology, behaviour, signalling, or psychology, Ian’s insight is kaleidoscopic. His combined overview of and affection for biology and robotics is remarkable. As we walk he chats about theory-of-mind among Corvids (crow-family), image classifying neural networks, Voronoi patterns of the Giraffes’ skin, Chimpansee politics, the zoo as theater or gesture in robotics and animal kingdoms. ARTIS seems an almost an ideal studio for him.

We enter the tropical greenhouse, which houses the Victoria Crown pigeon which is the main objective of a new robot he is developing, which aims to learn its body language, then mimic it in front of the common street pigeons of Amsterdam which freely move through the zoo. Along with the Crowned pigeon live fruitbats and various other birds including the Nicobar pigeon, the closest living relative to the dodo.

The camera has only just been installed, so his robot may not reach the stage of learning the Victorian Crowned pigeon’s intimately during this residency. But Ian has brought a range of robots to make the most of the many opportunities the Zoo offers. Ian’s robots develop over longer periods of time. They often evolve from first iterations to more attuned forms or specialised hybrids, much in the way animals speciate or adapt to local circumstances.

Throughout his work Ian has formed rules of practice and the Zoo answers one particular rule; rule #14 ‘Work with local and abundant animals’. Over the years Ian has found that working with animals is much more effective if they actually are around and in large numbers. That is basically what a zoo offers its audience, a high probability of encountering animals. This is what this residency capitalises on both for the artist and his robots.