Fragile Balances was created as a companion work to Fish-Bird. Velonaki wanted to create two new embodiments of Fish and Bird that would act as avatars to enable the activation of their dialogues in locations remote from the robots. She believed that the fact that the wheelchairs didn’t look at all technological contributed to the element of surprise and subsequent engagement.

In Fragile Balances Velonaki chose to design another object with a non-technological appearance, although it had to house highly-technological electronic modules. (See also Fragile Balances: Circle D).

Circle E is the final work of the Fish-Bird series. It was created to provide an interface where participants could handwrite and ‘post’ their own messages to the Fish and Bird characters. Circle E is a wooden table-like object with a rotating brass drum partially sunk into it, a notepad and pencil are placed on its top and a ‘postal bag’ hangs under the object. Members of the audience are encouraged to write to Fish and Bird, or to their loved ones and donate their letters to the project by feeding them through the slot into the drum when it pauses momentarily. All the letters are scanned and, at a later stage, added as text to the dialogues between the Fish-Bird robots.

Text M. Velonaki. Human-robot interaction in prepared environments: Introducing an element of surprise by reassigning identities in familiar objects. In N. Lee (ed), Digital Da Vinci: Computers in the Arts and Sciences, Springer, 2014, pp. 21–64.