This paper discusses Communing with robots, a post-digital artwork shown at Curiocity, the outdoor exhibition for The World Science Festival Brisbane 2022. The work questions how an individual’s sense of trust, privacy, and security might be affected in cities increasingly mediated by invasive information communications technologies. Notions of the so-called Smart City background the creative work, which conceives the urban environment transformed into a panoptic schema of surveillance capitalism. If left unchecked, the asymmetries of informational power, exacerbated by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Tech’s commercial agendas, and the Internet of Everything (IoE) –where networked structures connect people, machines, data, objects, and urban infrastructure–will permeate all aspects of everyday public life and transform it into a capital commodity.

The installation of Communing with robots in the South Bank Parklands proposed a slightly subversive creative transformation of a tiny part of the public sphere. This playful civic hack aimed to provide cathartic relief to the pervasive nature of technologies by undermining the rhetoric surrounding them. Its ontological structures metaphor the network effect by fusing satirical self-referential parodies. A standing reserve of surplus data, extracted from the World Wide Web with artificial intelligence, was used to create satirical nonsense prose and poetry, remixed with abstracted depictions of the urban environment conceived as pseudo-surveillance imagery. Paradoxically, while the work aimed to subvert the socio-technical commoditisation of the public sphere, it unintentionally evolved into a pseudo-surveillance-advertising device.