Geoffrey Drake-Brockman is exhibiting three major interactive artworks at the Curious Characters exhibition of automata artworks at the Morris Museum NJ, USA. The show is curated by Michele Marinelli and runs from the 15th of March to the 20th of June 2018. The Morris Museum is located in Morristown, in metropolitan New York, about 40m from Manhattan. The works included are: Floribots (2005/18), Coppelia One, (2018), and Parallax Dancer (2018). Floribots  has been awarded "best in show" of the exhibition. Curious Characters is the most extensive gallery exhibition of Drake-Brockman's interactive artworks ever brought together. Each of the pieces is a major work in the artist's cybernetics art practice. The three artworks embody quite different interactive modalities - a collective organism, a humanoid robot, and an augmented reality installation.

The Coppelia One and Parallax Dancer works share a common theme - a ballet dancer - in both cases modelled on prima ballerina Jayne Smeulders of the West Australian Ballet. The two works express this shared reference quite differently however - one being an anthropomorphic life-size robot with multiple joint articulations, the other being an augmented reality installation using digital animation and video screens. Despite these dissimilarities the two are actually twin artworks and can be considered as aspects of Geoffrey's long-standing project to treat traditional ballet as a state machine, see the artist's 2013 TEDx talk for details. Both artworks are also manifestly versions of the traditional ballerina music box automaton - albeit scaled up and with vastly increased complexity - so both fall readily into the Curious Characters curatorial focus on contemporary interpretations of figurative automata.

Unlike Coppelia One and Parallax Dancer - which will be exhibited for the first time at the Morris Museum - Floribots has been shown before; in 2005, 2007, and 2010; at the National Gallery of Australia, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and Singapore Art Museum. However, due the the nature of Floribots - with its thousands of moving parts and use of folded paper as its primary kinetic element - it required a complete rebuild since its last show, as it has been between each of its previous exhibitions. A new set of 128 origami blooms has been folded and mounted on its flowerpot stems, and the various wire, rubber, metal, plastic and electrical parts that allow it to perform have been extensively renewed. Floribots, like the other two works, is a figurative piece and fits readily into the Curious Characters figurative automata theme. The reference for Floribots comes however from the plant domain, specifically a flowerpot, rather than a person. Floribots is somewhat unusual in being a figurative kinetic artwork referencing a plant - as plants are not usually considered to be moving lifeforms. When conceiving of Floribots, the artist recalled watching nature shows on television where plant growth was sped-up with time-lapse photography. Thus it is the entire life cycle of a flower - growing, blooming, withering - that becomes the basis for the kinetic expression of Floribots. 

The artist acknowledges assistance from: The Australia Council for the Arts, The Government of Western Australia / division of Culture and the Arts, The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, The West Australian Ballet, headus (3D scanning and animation), Robotics Evolved (robot control systems), Jayne Smeulders (ballerina), UWA Engineering student teams lead by Bradley Burne & Emerson Brophy (machine vision), and the crowd funding supporters of The Coppelia Project.