Elephants Don't Love Peanuts But Humans Do
boredomresearch
Summary
In this Computer Arts Society talk, boredomresearch presents an overview of their twenty-year collaborative practice, which embeds artistic inquiry within scientific laboratories to explore environmental, biomedical and technological questions. They describe residencies with swarm-robotics researchers in Austria, where the resulting artwork “Robots in Distress” expresses ideas of vulnerability and agility rather than pure robustness. They also discuss cross-disciplinary workshops with animation students and a commission with the University of the West of Scotland that reimagines the Jacquard loom as a generative engine producing unique biological forms, reflecting on creative diversity lost to industrial mass production. A project with an Oxford neuroscientist translates the neural activity of sleeping mice into visual form, while recent work at the Biodesign Institute in Arizona examines cancer through evolutionary and ecological lenses. The talk’s title alludes to Peto’s paradox: elephants, despite having far more cells than humans, experience lower cancer rates because they carry multiple copies of the tumour-suppressor protein p53, a finding unrelated to peanuts. The collective explains how scientists there look to nature’s catalogue—including comb jellies, flatworms and simple organisms such as Trichoplax—to discover new model systems and defence strategies against cancer, inviting audiences to reconsider relationships between humans, animals and biomedical science.
This AI summary was generated by kimi-k2.7-code (13th August 2026).