Natalie Jeremijenko — Feral Robotic Dogs — environmental-justice robotics

2005

Artists: Natalie Jeremijenko · Year: 2005 · Medium: Hacked commercial toy-robots — repurposed as environmental-data-collection drones for community air-quality monitoring · Substrate: Hasbro iDog and similar commercial robotic toys; after-market environmental sensors; community-deployment programs in specific polluted neighborhoods · Place: New York, USA · Institution: NYU xClinic; various community partners Natalie Jeremijenko's Feral Robotic Dogs (2005–09) was a sustained practice of modifying commercial robotic dog toys — the Sony AIBO, various cheap RadioShack robot pets — so they could detect environmental pollutants. Jeremijenko and her students at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts hacked out the dogs' original behavior circuits, replaced them with custom circuitry that read air-quality sensors (primarily volatile organic compounds and specific airborne toxins), and retrained the dogs to walk toward pollution sources rather than toward their owners. The dogs were then released, en masse, into public parks in Harlem, Bronx, and Brooklyn at community-organized "Feral Robotic Dog" gatherings, where they trotted around sniffing for contaminants while residents watched and documented what the dogs found. The work was political ecology, art, and community-science at once. Harlem and the Bronx had known air-quality issues for decades, partly because of specific proximity to industrial facilities and high-traffic transit corridors. What Jeremijenko's feral dogs added was a legible, visually compelling, genuinely functional data-gathering instrument operated by residents themselves, whose movements through the neighborhood — captured on video and in shared data logs — produced a form of community-validated environmental record that regulators and journalists could subsequently engage with. Jeremijenko, an Australian-American engineer-artist who had taught at Yale before NYU, has framed her larger practice (which includes the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, tree-planting projects in New York City, and a sustained series of public performances framed around environmental measurement) as "xUrban Design" — a discipline at the intersection of art, engineering, environmental science, and community organizing. The Feral Robotic Dogs are the clearest single case where the four threads merged into a coherent work. This archive tracks Jeremijenko's practice because she is the clearest example of an artist whose medium is the apparatus itself — the modified toy, the DIY sensor, the workshop, the community-organized data-gathering — rather than the image or object produced. Every subsequent community-science-art practice in this archive (the citizen-sensor projects of Safecast after Fukushima, the community air-monitoring work that has proliferated in the 2010s and 2020s) is in conversation with the 2005 feral-dog work. Lore Jeremijenko ran the Feral Robotic Dog project as a series of open workshops: community members brought their own used AIBO or other robotic pet, Jeremijenko's team provided the sensor kits and the retraining instructions, and each workshop produced maybe a dozen newly-feral dogs. The total number of dogs produced over the project's four-year run is in the several hundreds. The Harlem and South Bronx community groups that co-organized the public releases treated the dogs as organizing tools as much as art objects; the visual spectacle of a small pack of battery-powered dogs trotting across a park was reportedly a far more effective community-meeting draw than standard environmental-education programming had been. Jeremijenko remains on the NYU faculty and is still active with the xClinic. Sources • Jeremijenko, Natalie — "Feral Robotic Dogs Information Kit" (xclinic.org, 2005). • NYU Environmental Health Clinic — xclinic.org. • Kac, Eduardo (ed.) — Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (MIT, 2007; Jeremijenko context).