Petra Gemeinboeck

Petra Gemeinboeck is an artist, artistic researcher, and academic working at the intersection of creative robotics, dance performance, and feminist theory. Her transdisciplinary practice explores and reimagines human-machine relationships through a unique art-led research approach that combines creative robotics, performance-making, and feminist new materialist thinking. Since founding the Machine Movement Lab with Rob Saunders in 2015, she has developed a speculative posthuman dramaturgy that investigates human-robot relationships as more-than-human entanglements arising from difference-in-relation. The project has attracted major research funding from Australia and Austria, delivering innovative methodologies that merge choreographic practices with robotics design, and over 20 peer-reviewed or curated research outputs.

       Her work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, National Art Museum of China (Beijing), NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), and Ars Electronica Center (Linz). Through the Machine Movement Lab, she has developed original approaches to human-robot interaction, including methods like Performative Body Mapping (PBM) and Relational Body Mapping (RBM) that harness dancers' kinesthetic expertise to explore machine embodiment. Her latest performance works "Alloyed Bodies" and "Dancing with the Nonhuman" investigate how movement and its dynamic qualities can propel meaning-making between radically different embodiments. Prior to developing her feminist creative robotics practice, Petra explored questions of machine agency through interactive installations and virtual (CAVE) environments.

       Gemeinboeck's research has been recognized through significant grants and fellowships, including an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2021-2025), an Austrian Science Fund PEEK arts-based research grant (2019-2023), and multiple ARC Discovery Projects. Her robotic installation "Accomplice" toured internationally, including exhibitions at Artspace Sydney, National Museum of China, and Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao). She was a finalist for the National New Media Art Award 2012 at the Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane and received an Honorary Mention at the Live 2011 Grand Prix, Digital Turku, Finland. She has held residencies at prestigious institutions including the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

       She completed her doctoral studies in Visual Culture at Vienna University of Technology with a dissertation on "Negotiating the Virtual: Inhabiting Architectures of Emergence and Remoteness." She also holds an MFA in Electronic Visualization from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Diplom-Ingenieur (equiv. to Masters) in Architecture from the University of Stuttgart. Over the past 20 years, she has worked across Australia, Austria, UK, Germany, USA, and France, developing an international profile in both artistic and academic contexts.

      Gemeinboeck frequently delivers featured talks and lectures internationally, advancing discourse around more-than-human and embodied approaches to human-machine relationships. Her academic career includes positions as Director of Postgraduate Research at UNSW Art & Design (Sydney), where she was also Deputy Director of the Creative Robotics Lab at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, and Senior Research Fellow at Falmouth University (UK). She is currently an Associate Professor at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, where she leads the Human-Robot Experience project as an ARC Future Fellow.