Comfortable and Alive

Comfortable and Alive is a hypnotic induction ritual available through machine translation in 6 languages. Relinquish control in a user-friendly future! Accompanied by a soothing new age soundtrack, an Actroid (Actroid-F by ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories) guides a hypnosis session for her viewer. Is the viewer human or machine? Can any body feel "comfortable and alive"? Actroid-F mimics a human hypnotist, while also satirising the ambivalence of humans to being touched by her — the fetishist discord of her image as simultaneous living computer, revulsive corpse, and enigmatic sex object. Comfortable and Alive is part of Knox’s ‘Actroid Series I’: six video artworks in which humanoid robots explore epochal anxieties such as obsession with appearances; ageing bodies; consumption; labour; sex; and ‘cheating’ death.