Former robotics resident Adrianne Wortzel was a recent guest on the twice-monthly podcast “Poptarts” (aka Girl Zone) hosted by BUST magazine editors Emily Rems and Callie Watts - celebrating women in pop culture.

Adrianne discussed her fascination with sentience when juxtaposed against machines and her pull to explore humanity through robotics. This passion carried over into her Thoughtworks Arts residency project, The Sentient Thespian, a film exploring attributions of sentience to robots, by humans, as a feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The podcast episode also highlights her new book project, See No Evil. The book includes a litany of fertile and anxious phrases with drawings of creatures from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities masking large sections of the text. In the interview, Adrianne says the book is about “wishing for the disintegration of the self” and that it was a long “selfie” process during inward-facing days of Covid. The book’s printing is unique because there’s an algorithm that changes the drawings’ placement on the pages, covering the text at different junctures - making each print a different version of the same story.

To learn more about Adrianne and listen to her full interview, visit BUST’s Poptarts podcast page.