Fiona Andreallo

Core Members

Fiona Andreallo is an Early Career researcher and EC Fellow at RMIT with a research focus on technological-human relationships. Her open-access book ‘Selfies and memes as Touch’ explores the concept of embodied Touch in digital social relationships. She has also previously published work on social robot design and representation where she has located the robotic representation of gender, the face and the eye within cultural significance and meaning.  

Her transdisciplinary research and publications span across faculties of Engineering, Health, and Fine Arts. At The Art Gallery of NSW, she worked on a project designing more inclusive community access for people living with Dementia and examining Touch through art-making as meaningful. She has also previously worked on research projects with MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development, and Hammond Care (Australia) developing personalised music prescriptions for people living with Dementia and an educational interactive video to make the findings accessible to families and carers.   

Fiona’s current work extends from her book, mapping and understanding social robots, intelligent systems and algorithms in aged and dementia care. Understanding that algorithms are neither intelligent nor artificial but designed by humans and representative of cultural ideals, Fiona has begun to map the ways technology can be understood as practices of Touch.  

She is currently collaborating with Larissa Hjorth (RMIT) on the topic of embodied Touch and companionship in technological contexts and is also contributing to Jill Rettberg’s (Bergen University, Norway) Machine Vision project.