In April 2020, artists Robertina Šebjanič, Louise Mackenzie, Karolina Żyniewicz and Isabel Burr Raty were invited by Dalila Honorato to develop research on the theme of “Staying in Touch: post-coronavirus art curating” as part of the collaborative digital art residency Braiding Friction. Working remotely across Slovenia, the UK, Poland, Belgium, Greece, USA and Portugal the group developed a speculative fiction in which art is the virus and art practitioners act as frontline workers. Braiding historical and contemporary art, architectural and bio-art practices, the group developed potential futures for post-pandemic art spaces, resulting in a fictional account of a series of art exhibitions that coincide with a pandemic event. The research was synthesised in the form of a pseudo-documentary premiered by the Creative Europe project BioFriction on 23rd July 2020. This article presents the transcript of the pseudo-documentary “Staying in Touch” (Honorato, Mackenzie, Żyniewicz, Burr Raty, Šebjanič and Tavares 2020, 00:00:00 to 00:47:55), set in 2039: an ergodic narrative constructed as a self-ethnographic role-playing exercise by its contributors, where alter-egos Vess L, Arri Val, K-130, Soladite Carnelian and Anise Neuchâtel reflect on their curatorial practices before, during and after the pandemic. Whilst the narrative draws from many academic and contemporary influences, any references to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places or incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. “Staying in Touch” was edited by Pavel Tavares with the support of Cultivamos Cultura and included cameo appearances by artists Marta de Menezes, Yann Marussich and Adam Zaretsky. At its core, this work is a case study of artistic research and the possibilities of interactive engagement during the COVID-19 lockdown.

In this chapter, we present the main interaction design issues that arise during the development of edutainment scenarios through the use of branded augmented reality (AR) authoring environments. Most proprietary AR systems offer limited interaction features within their entry-level version, while licensing unlocks the desired advanced features. In order to overcome this problem we employ experimental multimedia development methods for the design of content for those platforms, enabling the development of fully featured case studies where interaction is implemented both physically and virtually. The introduction and literature research sections are complemented by selected experimental case studies that explore the interaction capabilities. It is shown how these may be implemented using limited AR resources. The chapter concludes with the presentation of the social software perspective of the communication process, as the application areas and the content domain presented in this work feature clear collaborative potential that needs to be addressed by system design.

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Human–robot interaction (HRI) is the study focused on the relationship between humans and robots. HRI as a study combines elements from different fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, psychology and sociology. With the advancement in the field of AI, HRI showed greater improvements and now, we have the first robot recognized as a citizen of a country: Sophia the robot. Sophia is a robot that has a humanoid form, first made her appearance in 2016 and, according to her creators, is a mix of technology, arts and robotics. Since then, Sophia has made a lot of appearances in different TV shows, given interviews and participated in commercials. Sophia also has her own social media accounts. Our study focuses on Sophia’s presence on social media and the ways she communicates with people and the rhetorics she makes use of. Hence, it studies the advances on HRI and the issues encountered in the field of communication. For our research, we used purposive sampling and content analysis in cases needed in order to study Sophia’s communication patterns and behaviour. At this point, we will delve into the communication with the AI aspect of HRI.