Closing Reception  

Wednesday, April 2, 2025 | 7 – 9PM 
InterAccess (32 Lisgar St, Toronto, ON) 

In May of 2024, the ROB|ARCH Conference ‘Beyond Optimization’ offered a rich prompt to presenters and attendees: how can we reconcile the limitations of the ‘computable’ with the incomprehensible entropy of the real world? The growing presence of robotics in art, research, design, and construction has changed the way we practice and think through our tools as the role of robotics in creative practices and manufacturing industries has grown, shifted, and evolved. Robots are no longer a shiny novelty restricted to niche research proposals but are now a fundamental technical tool for interfacing between digital and physical worlds. Even our understanding of what a robot can look like has evolved: the inter-disciplinary discourse that has emerged around digital fabrication machines and industrial arms now includes myriad robot morphologies, scales, and applications — think aerial machines for construction, choreographed robotic swarms in performance, millimeter-scale robots for medical applications. In some ways, we have witnessed our machines grow up along with the discipline; no longer restricted to the structured environments of research labs, they have entered the real world and taken their place within it. Acknowledging the momentum of these shifts within our broader social, political, and environmental contexts, ROB|ARCH urges its community to reflect on this moment with a critical lens. Beyond Optimization aims to create space for discussion across technical and critical discourses that welcomes a diverse group of researchers, artists, and thinkers in robotics and beyond. 

This retrospective exhibition is led by Jonathon Anderson (Toronto Metropolitan University), Nicholas Hoban (University of Toronto), and Zachary Mollica (University of Toronto).  

ABOUT ROB|ARCH 2024 

ROB|ARCH 2024 was hosted in Toronto, Canada, from May 21-25, 2024 as a collaboration between the University of Toronto (UofT) and Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). The conference featured a series of eight workshops and three days of programming, including keynotes by Sougwen Chung, Brian Ringley, and Yusuke Obuchi, and a special session by the Association for Robots in Architecture. 

ROB|ARCH 2024 invited leading researchers from around the world to host three-day intensive workshops in Toronto, Canada. Each workshop focused on the creative uses of robotic production, ranging from the testing of architectural interventions to robotic performance and filming to the design of objects and installations. Participants engaged in hands-on explorations while learning how to program the robots and produce the work on display at InterAccess.