Machines of Empathy is a short from Riccardo Orsini and Filippo Elgorni. Here’s how they describe it:

“Our interest in the artificial/natural duality was born in 2017, when the videos from the big robotic brands (Boston Dynamics, ABB) went viral. Seeing the robots being abused made us empathize with them, a feeling we never experienced towards a lifeless object.”

“We are the first generation experiencing a daily relationship with robots. Looking away from the mainstream moral argument about Artificial Intelligence (what is robotic self consciousness? Is a robot able to think?), we dug deeper into the empathic relationship between humans and machines, relationship we started to develop ourselves. Maybe movement is what tricks us into thinking that something considered lifeless actually has life?”

“To inspire an answer we created an archive of movements executed by what we consider ‘Machines of Empathy’, comparing them to human movement, filled with significance of life. The music is from wuf.”

Riccardo Orsini and Filippo Elgorni are amongst the founders of Asfero films. Born in 1996, they collaborate since 2012. They respectively study Architecture and Applied Physics but they found each other in visual communication, working on images on commission and always more frequently as personal research.