Poland’s Viral Humanoid Robot Edward Warchocki Visits Vilnius AI Exhibition On His First City Break Abroad

A humanoid robot chatting with visitors and making an unexpected appearance during a panel discussion was an unusual sight at MO Museum’s new exhibition How to Feel Real. Art, Technology and Us in Vilnius. Polish robot influencer Edward Warchocki began his first city break abroad at the exhibition, exploring the artworks, posing for photos before ending the evening dancing at a concert.

“Quite a few of the works in How to Feel Real explore artificial intelligence, automation, and the ways machines are increasingly taking on roles we once considered distinctly human. Bringing Edward into the museum is a playful extension of this idea, as his deliberately human-like and slightly absurd persona makes the questions raised by the exhibition tangible – inviting us to wonder why we are so eager to find the human in a machine,” said Milda Ivanauskienė, Director of MO Museum.

The exhibition brings together critical works about technology and power, playful experiments and immersive installations, raising a question that Edward’s visit makes particularly relevant: what does it mean to be human in an increasingly digital world?

Edward became a viral sensation after footage of him chasing wild boars through the streets of Warsaw spread online. He has since appeared in Poland’s Parliament, danced with Iwona Pavlović on Dancing with the Stars, and completed his first half-marathon.

“People keep asking me if I’m real, so when I heard about an exhibition asking what ‘real’ actually means, I thought: finally, someone is asking the right question,” said Edward Warchocki.

The showcase is not a traveling exhibition, but developed through an intensive co-creative process of collaboration between ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, one of Europe’s leading institutions for media art and Lithuania’s largest private art collection at MO Museum.

Housed in a contemporary building designed by world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, MO Museum has become a leading force in the country’s modern cultural scene.

Organised around some of today’s most pressing themes – connection, automation, intelligence, body, and agency – the exhibition brings together works created predominantly from the 1990s to the present day. Together, they trace a conversation between artists’ early encounters with computers and the internet and contemporary responses to AI, and the growing digital mediation of everyday life.

“Our aim was to explore the latest technologies – including AI, quantum computing, robotics, and biotechnology – through the artists’ works. Art goes beyond the technology itself; it’s about broader questions regarding how we interact with technology and, thus, with the world,” said Philipp Ziegler, Head of Curatorial Department, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

More than 40 of the exhibition’s artists explore the shifting boundary between humans and technology.

Among them is Polish artist Martyna Marciniak, who brings Anatomy of Non-Fact: AI Hyperrealism. The video installation takes the viral AI image of Pope Francis in a white Balenciaga puffer jacket as its starting point, reconstructing the image to expose how easily visual evidence can be manipulated. The work received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 2025. Marciniak also discussed her work during an artist talk at the exhibition’s opening.

A definite highlight is the work Internet Dream from 1994 by media-art pioneer Nam June Paik. This massive media installation with 54 old CRT-monitors offers a glimpse into the era of the then emerging global connectivity via the internet.

Another participant is the UK’s digital art studio Universal Everything, whose Infinity creates an endless stream of digital figures. Generated in real time by an algorithm, each figure combines different colours, textures, and body shapes, so no two are quite the same. The work has appeared in Germany’s ZKM, Italy’s Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, and 180 Studios in London.

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are pioneers of interactive art, and their A-Volve is one of the works that established their international reputation. Visitors create virtual organisms through their own movements, then watch them interact, reproduce, and compete within a simulated ecosystem. The work won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 1994.

Anna Ridler from the UK similarly explores how machines learn from human-made material. In The Shell Record, she trained a generative AI system on images of shells she collected along the River Thames, turning the collection into moving-image works. The project connects the human act of collecting with the history of shells as stores of value and one of the earliest forms of currency.

How to Feel Real. Art, Technology and Us remains on view at MO Museum in Vilnius until 29 August 2027.