Dancing Through Life: From Origami Robotics to Sculptural Art

_{^{Written by Jillian Mallon}}

_{^{Caption for featured photo: A group picture at the Dancing Through Life Exhibition. Bottom left to right: residency host Prof. Cynthia Sung and The Arts League Director and exhibition host Grace Palladino. Top left to right: Diedra Krieger, CIS PhD student and residency mentor Daniel Feshbach, and artist-in-residence Erin Rose Boyle.}}

The first line of the song “Dancing Through Life” from the musical turned movie series Wicked claims that the trouble with schools is that they always try to teach the wrong lesson. If this lyric was viewed through the lens of academic research, one might argue that the “wrong lesson” refers to the boundaries between academic disciplines in terms of methods and practices. Without interdisciplinary collaboration, researchers might not be able to explore different applications of their work or the impact it could have on other trades. 

One way that the GRASP Lab has explored these boundaries is through the Sung Robotics Lab’s collaboration with The Arts League of Philadelphia, and more specifically through hosting Erin Rose Boyle, artist and the Assistant Director of Academic Enrichment Programs and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, during an artist-in-residence program at the lab. Boyle’s residency culminated in an exhibit of her resulting sculptural work that she appropriately titled Dancing Through Life, which merged art with origami robotic designs and software tools, and a workshop at The Arts League for participants to learn how to make a miniature version of her “Dancing Cubes” piece.

_{^{Video walkthrough of the Dancing Through Life exhibit at The Arts League.}}

Boyle was first introduced to Sung Robotics Lab through an earlier workshop held at The Arts League in September of 2024 that was led by Daniel Feshbach, a CIS PhD student in Prof. Cynthia Sung’s lab. “I found out about the workshop that was being held at the Arts League during the fall of 2024,” Boyle recalled. “I knew it was connected in part to a residency opportunity, but I was also interested in seeing how they were applying robotics in relation to art.”

The workshop aimed to inform the public about origami-inspired robotics as an example highlighting how artistic and engineering design complement one another. To experience this for themselves, participants built their own Artistic Non-Inertial Tracer (ANT), a robot folded from origami that slithers around to trace visually interesting patterns on the ground (Feshbach developed ANT in Summer 2024 along with two high school interns in Sung Lab: Alex Chi, now at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Eric Huang, now at Johns Hopkins University). As part of the workshop, the group advertised for the summer 2025 artist-residence program. 

Boyle was intrigued by the similarities between the project and her own experiences with merging art with other academic disciplines and the potential impact that a collaboration with roboticists would have on both her teaching and her personal art. “I work in Academic Enrichment, where I support students through co-curricular programming, facilitate exhibition opportunities, and create connections across the many colleges and disciplines throughout the university.” explained Boyle. “One collaborative project we developed took the form of a harmonograph scaled to the proportions of a playground swing set, an oversized suspended structure in which drawing emerged through the interaction of weight, force, and pendular motion. By carefully calibrating balance and allowing the system to respond to variations in momentum and swing, the apparatus became a kind of performative drawing instrument, generating intricate patterns through its own physical logic. I was drawn to the workshop for that reason. I was interested in how my job, my experiences, and this process I’ve long been fascinated by might connect to my own artwork. I thought this could be an opportunity where I start to make some of those connections.”

When selecting Boyle for the residency, Feshbach noticed the correlation between her artistic approach and Sung Robotics Lab’s soft robotics as well. “She had a really good combination of impressive and interesting maturity in the way she thinks about 3D structures and motion, but didn’t have experience with electronics and motors,” recalled Feshbach. “We all thought that there was potential for a few new tools to go a long way in her practice. It was, in fact, really exciting to see. As soon as I showed her some relatively simple ways of attaching one or two servos to an Arduino, the code to get them to go to particular angles, and the ways you can make some sort of templated mounts and bolt them into things, she really unlocked a lot of new ways for her to make motion into structures.”

One of the first ideas that Boyle proposed to the lab was an extension of a project that she had previously developed as a 3D design course assignment. The concept, which she refers to as “dancing cubes”, was already similar to research in Sung Robotics Lab in that the cube’s design is an origami tessellation similar to those used in the lab to create shape-changing robots. 

_{^{Daniel Feshbach’s ANT project and Erin Rose Boyle’s sculpture “Why Invite Stress in?” share similar mounting structures to attach servomotors.}}

“I have long been interested in finding meaningful ways to connect my teaching to my studio practice. In my classes, I teach students how to transform flat surfaces into three-dimensional forms. Because students often lose interest in making shapes that feel purely formal or nonfunctional, I began incorporating movement into these structures by joining the corners of four cubes so that they could shift and bounce in relation to one another,” Boyle said. “More recently, I have been exploring how that movement might become self-activated through the use of a motor or another mechanical system.”

Luckily, her new mentor had the mechanical and computational expertise needed to bring the dancing cubes to life. “We used literally the same structures [for mounting servomotors] from the ANT project. We stuck those on the dancing cubes, and it worked,” Feshbach explained.

To expand Boyle’s origami toolkit beyond just cube tessellations, Feshbach introduced her to the types of origami patterns used in engineering applications. Boyle explored how Sung Robotics Lab graduate students integrated these types of patterns into their research. For example, one undertaking of 2024 alumnus and current Penn MEAM lecturer Jessica Weakly’s PhD thesis dissertation was the fabrication of a push-on twist-off passive gripper that utilized the Kresling origami pattern as an actuator. When the gripper is open and pushed toward an item, the two-unit Kresling pattern at its base compresses to close the gripper. “That was one of the patterns I showed Erin at the beginning, and I showed her some examples,” Feshbach recalled. “I showed her Jessica’s gripper and some examples from Prof. Glaucio Paulino’s lab at Princeton.” 

Another project that piqued Boyle’s interest was MEAM PhD student Gabe Unger’s MORF (Magnetic Origami Reprogramming and Folding System). It is an autonomous system that uses magnetic programming and thermal activation to allow laminate sheets composed of multiple triangular magnetic portions to self-assemble and fold. Boyle noticed a connection between MORF and her work during her first visit to the lab after receiving the residency. 

“I had already been working with a closely related triangular pattern in my own practice when I encountered Gabe’s system,” Boyle recalled. “That overlap felt unexpectedly generative, as though it opened a natural path for further inquiry into ideas I was already exploring. At the same time, our approaches were fundamentally distinct. My interest was in the softness, flexibility, and fabric-like qualities these forms could suggest, whereas Gabe was investigating how similar units might be activated into a more rigid, self-supporting structure with greater formal definition.”

_{^{A video demonstration of Gabe Unger’s MORF project.}}

After learning some of the software and mechanical tools that could be used to create motion, Boyle explored different material and visual aspects of these tools to breathe artistic life into the structures. 

Boyle’s creative exploration also impacted how Feshbach thinks about the relationship between motion and expression, which he expects will shape his future engineering, outreach, and teaching. “In the robots I work on, I’m not used to spending much time thinking about their aesthetics, but seeing her bring in lots of new materials and paper types and applying color patterns with silk screens brought very different life to the same underlying mechanisms. It’s making me think more about multimodal communication and interaction with moving mechanisms, about the different layers affecting how humans interact with or can use machines.” On a functional level, Feshbach noted, “I was delighted to see the wide variety of structures and motions she got out of the same few technical building blocks with Arduinos and servos and simple ways of attaching them to things… It’s helping me think through the capabilities of modular actuators with standardized connections to custom-designed links which can be made with our computational design tools.” 

Feshbach plans to bring this insight to future teaching and outreach activities he works on with high school students: “A big part of my focus in these plans is on getting the high schoolers to have engaging experiences with a custom design process where they get to feel ownership and pride over their creations, to hopefully convince them that they’re capable of becoming engineers or designers… Erin showed me what a wide variety of functionalities and feelings she drew out of just a few technical building blocks, making me realize I should focus somewhat more on depth over breadth when picking what tools to introduce to the high schoolers to scaffold exciting design processes.”

As the residency ended at the end of the summer, Boyle prepared to showcase her work in exhibition at The Arts League in early winter 2026. The first challenge was to scale up her sculptural interpretations of origami robotics into human-size proportions. 

“My work typically operates at a larger scale, which significantly shaped the direction of this exhibition. I entered the process understanding that, once scale became a central factor, the forms would inevitably change in ways that introduced new questions of weight, folding, and mathematical structure,” Boyle shared. “I never expected to find myself engaging with trigonometry again, but Daniel was exceptionally skilled at meeting me where I was. Our collaboration developed through a productive exchange: he helped me attend more carefully to certain technical considerations, while I encouraged forms of experimentation that pushed the work in directions he might not otherwise have pursued. That reciprocal process became one of the most rewarding aspects of the project.”

As her larger sculptures began to take shape, she started noticing the similarities between her evolving work and the aforementioned ballad “Dancing Through Life”, which urges listeners to embrace carelessness instead of stress. 

“I kept returning to the idea of motion as something performative, and as the sculptures developed, they began to feel less like static objects and more like dance partners, especially because so much of the work exists at a human scale,” Boyle explained. “That association brought me back to “Dancing Through Life”, which felt like a fitting reminder not to become too burdened by everything. In my day-to-day work, I can easily get caught in cycles of overthinking, so the process of making these pieces, particularly within such a compressed period of time, became both responsive and restorative. It gave me a space to move with the work rather than control it too tightly, to let it shift, sway, and surprise me a little. It became its own kind of choreography. And, admittedly, it did not hurt that Wicked: For Good was arriving in theaters at exactly the same moment I was making the work.”

She began naming each art piece in the exhibit after lyrics from the song, such as “Stop Studying Strife”, “Why Invite Stress in?”, and “Those who don’t Try Never Look Foolish”. One particular piece, titled “Gliding Where Turf is Smooth”, combined elements of motion from her prior practice with new tools she learned in Sung Robotics Lab. On the engineering side, the structural design is inspired by the Miura fold rigid origami technique and motorized in a way that the bottom of the structure curls upward. Boyle enhanced these elements by incorporating implied movement by projecting light toward the piece so that the reflection and gaps in material move in unison with the physical piece. 

_{^{Erin Rose Boyle’s “Gliding Where Turf is Smooth” piece in motion.}}

“I became fascinated with the Miura fold and started imagining it as a kind of curtain revealing my past,” Boyle explained. “For this exhibition, I was working with images of bricks and buildings and thinking about how rigid urban construction can feel, while trying to soften that language through the work itself. That piece, for me, holds a sense of reflection. There is this highly ordered city pattern, but embedded within it is an image of that structure breaking into the forest. When activated, the curtains reveal an open void and a shadow in motion, creating a quiet meditation on the remnants of past experiences and the ways they continue to echo through the present. I had originally programmed more varied patterns and waves of movement, but in the end, simpler coding served the piece better. What felt right was a steady, rhythmic motion, something closer to breathing. It started to resemble a lung to me, carrying both vulnerability and pressure. In that way, the work became tied to my own life and to the metaphor built by the tension between the overwhelming density of buildings in the city and the quiet release of breaking into a more peaceful, forested space of pause and restoration. It speaks to those moments when the only response is to slow down, sit with the repetition, and keep breathing.”

The Dancing Through Life exhibit took place at The Arts League from January 12th to February 20th, with a reception on February 10th and a teaching workshop on February 21st. When Feshbach attended the exhibit, he was moved by how Boyle transformed functional motion into artistic emotion.

“We had these functional prototypes of these mechanisms [in the lab], but I was surprised to see how much more alive they felt in the content of the exhibit,” said Feshbach. “The aesthetics, decoration, coloring, and patterns gave them more feeling. It matters for making it look nice, but it also matters for shaping how I understand the nature of the motion more than I appreciated until I saw the final versions. I thought, ‘Wow, this is a different thing than the mechanically similar prototype we were working on over the summer,’ and that was kind of mind-expanding.”

In a full-circle moment, Boyle chose the dancing cubes as the focus of her workshop. Now that she had finally learned how to automate one of her own instruction models, she could now teach a workshop on the same piece, but with a whole new set of tools. The workshop was held at The Arts League on February 21st and introduced Boyle’s robotic art to 11 adults and 7 children.

_{^{Click on the arrows to slide through this gallery of photos taken by Diedra Krieger at the dancing cube Workshop on February 21st at The Arts League.}}

Now that the exhibition has ended, Boyle is excited to further push the boundaries of art and sculpture in her own practice by sharing the endless possibilities that come from extradisciplinary collaborations.

“This experience has made me even more interested in building collaborations with Temple’s engineering community and thinking more intentionally about where those points of crossover can occur,” Boyle shared. “I am already working with MFA students who are taking robotics courses this year, so it feels like an ideal moment to begin bridging those spaces in a more active way. What excites me most is the possibility of creating collaborative opportunities that invite students, especially those just arriving, to move beyond the boundaries of their usual buildings and discover the broader creative and intellectual landscape Temple has to offer. I want students to feel that they can move across colleges, disciplines, and ways of thinking, rather than imagining themselves confined to a single school or program.”

As an interdisciplinary lab since its inception in 1979, the GRASP Lab also plans to continue to reach outside of the boundaries of the typical engineering curriculum. In addition to the aforementioned outreach activities that Feshbach has in the pipeline, GRASP is open to fostering new art collaborations through the support of former Kod*Lab Lab Coordinator Diedra Krieger.

_{This project was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant #2322898. The Arts League and Sung Robotics Lab especially thank Diedra Krieger for their role in coordinating and executing the residency program.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.}