ETC Research is where we show our working. A collection of ongoing studies, technical experiments and creative explorations - the prototypes, process and thinking that sit behind the finished work.

It's not play, but it is fun.

We pick a question each year and spend time chasing it.

Artists across ETC are given a week to explore this question. A visual approach, a technical method, an idea pulled apart and put back together.
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Outputs are small by design: tests, sketches, renders, things made to think rather than to finish.

Our Current Brief: Sensing Tomorrow.
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How do machines learn to understand the world, and how does that understanding become human?
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Spatial intelligence is the thread - the way robots, vehicles, drones, buildings and learning models perceive the space around them. Depth, distance, weight, proximity, motion.

We're exploring this through three ways of sensing:

Awareness of self. How a system understands its own body, its own movement, its own errors.

Awareness of others. How machines move in groups, mimic biology, behave as a collective.

Awareness of the world. How environments are mapped, remembered, rebuilt from point clouds and depth data and signal.

Running alongside is a counter-question: how do we make any of this feel human?

Machine perception is digital, abstract,
and a little uncanny by default. Our interest is in pulling it back toward something tactile. Analogue textures, handmade rhythms, the warmth of imperfection. Empathy sensed rather than felt.