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Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns have collaborated on a new art work which investigates one of the possible human-robot relationships. Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positions, "Sleep Waking" acts as a way to "play-back" dreams.
I asked Fernando to give us more details about the robot: How does Sleep Waking work exactly? I spent a night at The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in Albany, NY. There they wired me up with a variety of sensors, recording everything from EEG to EKG to eye positioning data. We then took that data and interpreted it in two ways: The eye position data we simply apply to the position the robot's heads is looking. So if my eye was looking left, the robot looks left. The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The "behaviors" the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream. We also use robot vision for navigation and keeping the robot on its pedestal. This camera is mounted about three feet above the robot and it not shown in the documentation. Video: What do you think the robot can bring to our understanding of possible human-robot relationships? Sleep Waking is a metaphor for a reality that could be in our future. In the piece we use a fair amount of artistic license. Though the eye positioning data is a literal interpretation, what we do with the EEG data is a bit more subjective. However, perhaps one day we will have the technology to literally allow a robot to act out what we do in our dreams. What could we learn from seeing our dreams played back for us? Will we save our dreams like we save our photographs? Taking a wider view, robots are increasingly used to augment human experience. From robotic prosthetic devices, personalized web presences, and implanted RFID chips, technology is moving from being an externalized tool, to being a literal extension of who we are. By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means. Did you use an existing robot or did you build it from scratch? We used a modified Kondo KHR-2HV humaniod robot. In the next iteration of this piece, we will be fabricating my own design for a humanoid robot. Thanks Fernando! See Sleep Waking at the BRAINWAVE: Common Senses exhibition which opens on February 16 at Exit Art. Another of Fernando's work, 8520 S.W.27th Pl. v.2, is still on view at the Emergentes exhibition at the LABoral center in Gijon, Spain until May 12, 2008.
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One more from the work in progress exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London. Tuur Van Balen, student of Design Interactions turned his attention to drinking water. Water service companies add fluoride to the water to reduce tooth decay, in the UK, in the US and other countries. It has also been said that the army in some countries added bromide to drinking water in order to quell sexual arousal amongst male soldiers. Male fish in some area turn female because the oestrogen in birth-control pills ends up in the river.
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment. The first chapter of this exploration of new biological interactions is dedicated to Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the work-in-progress-show at RCA, he offered tap water (kindly provided by Thames Water) and asked visitors to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. He added the samples and postcodes to a map of London which contains biological information. Because i liked his project a lot and wanted to make sure i wouldn't write anything too silly about it, i asked Tuur to give us more details about his research. I'm passing the microphone to him: The installation / intervention in the show is part of a bigger, ongoing project called My City = My Body. I'm interested in how cities are not as much made up by streets and buildings as they are made up by our behaviour and experiences. (The London of a design-student, cycling around from Shoreditch to South-Ken is totally different from the London of a banker in a black cab with his blackberry and a loft in Notting Hill) These experiences are heavily mediated by technology, just look at the way mobile communication networks totally reshaped our cities.
What I'm interested in, is how future technologies might influence our urban behaviour. We're on the verge of a new area, an area that relies on the understanding of our body and the understanding of our DNA. What does this mean for the cities of tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? ... The biological map in the interim show was an 'intervention' using the show as a platform to get feedback on these ideas. By gathering urine samples, I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to test the urine samples in the show. As England is the Mecca of Health&Safety, it was a struggle which took me up to Senior Management to even exhibit my project in this form ("Bio-hazard, sir!") Continuing this research, I'm trying to contact a laboratory to look at bacteria, how bacteria could be a possible way of transforming our biological waste into information (inspired by Drew Endy's BioBricks project) and what the consequences in our everyday lives could be... Thanks Tuur!
Images of the project courtesy of Tuur van Balen. |
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Active Ingredient from Nottingham have always been trying to make "hard" technology a bit softer and to reveal an emotional side to it – ideally evoking that kind of feeling when the little hairs in your neck stand up. For instance their early works Ghost Engine or Chemical Garden, "a magical garden where robots roam, live webcam images from around the world are transmitted, messages can be sent, and a beautiful forest of crystal trees grow whilst you wonder". Basically, all of their pieces are concerned with some kind of spectacle and the experience of something live and how to engage people into it. This directly lead them to working with GPS representing location in space which they want to contrast to the narrative space of imagination and which then hopefully is grown into a magical moment by the audience.
One such project is the well-known 'Ere Be Dragons, a game that is "using the heart as a joystick". It came out of the notion of happiness being nothing else then total immersion into something, which lead them (not unlike Biomapping, see previous post) to look at heart rates to evaluate the level of immersion. During the game which needs no buttons or other traditional means of control, gamers become explorers of a territory created by one's own heartbeat plus location in space. The title refers to what sailors would put into the blank spots which hadn't been discovered yet and where fearsome monsters were suspected to be (or just to make their trips sound a bit more adventurous). Gameplay is based on five heart rate-levels ranking, with different kinds of terrain being created as (real) space is being crossed. From low (featureless desert), optimum (a lush landscape) to high (dark forest). In multiplayer mode, it is also possible to steal territory from other players and in often there were also performers in costumes which the players would encounter during the game to knit the game and the physical space together a bit more tightly.
Love City was a more recent project of Active Ingredient. Set between Nottingham, Derby and Leicester – three cities which are meant to be a commercial triangle but between which there's always been some rivalry – it aimed to "make them fall in love". This project had to work on everyday technology, so it used a combination of SMS-messaging and the ID of the cell tower to approximately locate players. Love City is an imaginary place which is in a way was superimposed onto the real cities, so whoever was at one of the three cities' train stations also was at Love City's station and could communicate with people there. The main objective of the project was to establish personal, yet anonymous connections and thus build an environment through competitive flattering (!) between players. A player could compiment other players and then they would choose if they would accept it or not. Matt and Rachel had no numbers but I would suspect that there was a major boost for each city's image of the other two (or each others inhabitants, respectively). Sohyun Park gave a little overview of the activities at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, including again Taeyoon Choi's projects, the Seoul-version of Pac Manhattan and a game of chess in urban space by Bean Noh in which the players were wearing silly balloons on their heads. It would probably be too much to cover all the projects here, but it seems as if there's loads going on in South Korea at the moment. After that, my own presentation of Blinks & Buttons, and a switch to (much more entertaining) translation mode due to the influx of non-English-speaking people for the rest of talks.
Yuko Mohri's Magnetic Organ is an installation that intentionally looks like an experimental setup from a physics lab. The piece tries to explore in how far magnetic forces, which obviously are beyond human perception, can serve as raw material for an acoustic experience in the context of an installation. It consists of a delicate setup of one motor as a generator, creating an electromagnetic field and four different coils which serve as antennas to pick up that field and convert it into sound that one can hear. The same relationship between sound, objects and space(s) is being explored with her work Composition in Progress. It plays Vexations, Erik Satie's early exploration into minimal music 1895 which is meant to be repeated 840 times by the pianist, "consecutively to oneself" as Satie wrote. Yuko's piece is automatically being repeated by the computer the same amount of times but every time it is being re-recorded from the space it is exhibited in, vaguely similar to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. However, her version of Vexations includes various parameters such as, most importantly, the resonance of the space, but also other ambient noises and the repeated process of conversion between analog and digital. It's worth mentioning that the whole process is made transparent through screens which show the software working and a sheet of paper containing the current composition is printed out with each iteration. A newer version of this project was also nominated for the Transmediale-award in 2006.
More projects of hers include a lovely installation in a high school-gym in which she connected a piano to the building by using thin wires in order to "play" it and a piece called Taiwa-Hensokuki which is a conversation between two speech-enabled computers that leads to increasing misunderstandings between the two robot-ladies due to the fuzzyness of the voice-recognition and the nature of the texts that they read. The changing cultural backdrop of Korea is also one of Inyong Cho's main subjects, more specifically the way that a family's ancestors are being remembered. Traditionally, there is a little box (which on the pictures he was showing almost looked like a piece of furniture) that symbolically represents the space which the person still occupies. As said, this is changing along with the rest of Korean culture and to put up a website as a site of remembering is not uncommon, either because people don't have enough time to visit an actual grave or because they might live abroad. In these cases, as Inyong described, people will actually bow to a website. With his own project Scanmemories, he wants to elaborate on the notion of creating digital memory objects a bit further and ultimately create a company which will keep and maintain the information. Practically, a customer would upload his or her selection of memories to a protected database which then would be tied to an RFID-chip. The chip is, visibly or invisibly attached to an object of the customer's choosing which thus becomes a kind of token for selected people to access the stored information with. The audience wasn't too convinced by the idea of relying on a pretty specific technology like RFID when talking about decades if not centuries, but the possibility of intentionally leaving memories behind seemed to resonate with many.
In the evening there were several performances by artists like Naoko Takahashi or Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic who together form syntfarm, a quasi-scientific team who "geo-spatially explore places and facts", meticulously collect samples and turn them into generative audiovisual performances. Specimen so far include the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the Kusu Anemone and soon – after a trip to Fuji-san the day before – Fuji Basalt. |
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I've been countless times to Venice and have given up trying to figure out how all those tiny curvaceous streets might correspond to what i see on the map. I just ask passersby, they are always nice and helpful. Which is the biggest mystery of Venice to me. How do they manage not to be annoyed by silly tourists like me who keep asking their way? Been quite an adventure to locate the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel (seems that this 15th century gothic marvel is for sale) but i couldn't afford not to go as it is hosting the Mexican Pavilion, the only one which presents new media art (at least the only one i had heard of). It's not any kind of media art either. The installations are by one of the discipline's most respected practitioners: Rafael Lozano Hemmer. There are brand new pieces and some good old works as well. At this point i feel like i should just go to the other room and finish my Rebus book, leaving you with this really charming (how could you not love to learn new expressions such as "biting your poncho"?) and interesting video of Lozano Hemmer's presenting his works at the Tate in London. He explains better than my words would, the sources of his inspiration, the way he tries to create complex behaviour similar to organic systems, how important it is to misuse technologies (in particular the always more sophisticated and often embedded with prejudice technologies of surveillance) in a critical and poetic way.
Now just a few words to tell about two of Lozano'Hemmer's latest pieces. The first greets you when you enter the first room. Rows of 50 white Eames molded plastic chairs, mounted on electromechanical pistons move up and down in a sensual way. The work, which premiered in Venice, is called Wavefunction. As unveiled on the screen visible in the adjacent room, the movements are controlled by a computer surveillance system and respond to the presence of the public by creating waves that propagate over the exhibition room. One person approaching the chairs will trigger a wave, more people around the chairs will create waves that interfere with each other.
The other new work is Pulse Room which turns the heartbeats of the visitors into light flashes shown by incandescent light bulbs. Visitors have to grab the same kind of interface that you find at the gym on the cardio training machines and which measures your pulse. The first person who enter the room lights a first bulb, it will flicker according to their heartbeat, a second person light another bulb and so on. When i arrived there were dozens of bulbs on and an old man. you could see he was very tempted, he just wanted to try but was wondering whether "that thing would send him an electroshock or something?" The exhibition is curated by Príamo Lozada and Bárbara Perea. Lozada was one of Latin America's most active media art curators. He passed away on the 13th of June as a result of a tragic accident in Venice. The museum where he worked, the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, is now making a documentation centre that will have his name to honour him. More details about the show. More videos of the artist's installations. |
More Venice coverage. Most of the 
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Just back from Dislocate 07, a great little exhibition in two venues around Tokyo and a two-day symposium at ZAIM Yokohama. Organized by Emma Ota, Kentaro Chiba and other curators, Ginza Art Lab (littlest gallery ever, but since Ginza reportedly used to be worth as much as California, it's a lot of space) and Koiwa Project Space are filled to the ceiling with interesting works by almost 40 both Japanese and western artists. I will primarily cover the symposium here but anyone who's around Tokyo should check out the exhibition spaces, runs until August 5th.
Christian Nold opened the Dislocate symposium with a fairly critical assessment of location-based art. His project Biomapping has been around for about 3,5 years now – a lot of time to reflect on this kind of work and why it makes sense or not in different contexts. To really understand location-based works, one has to know that many of the ideas of today's media-related art go back to the late 19th century when also the idea of biometrics was envisioned by the British, primarily to track people in India which then still was a colony.
The lie detector is another technology from that time on which Biomapping is built on, combining it with mobility and location-awareness through the GPS-system. The presumption behind this classic device is basically that your body will at all times tell the truth. Present-day neuroscientists describe emotion and feeling as being two different things: emotions happen in the body while feeling is rather the sensation of observing one's own bodily reactions. Biomapping takes up that paradigm and spatially tracks the users basic emotions through his or her galvanic skin resistance, thus creating emotion-maps of various places, preferably in community-contexts of some sort.
According to Christian, most location-based works can roughly be divided in two camps: mobile media and media that is put in specific locations. Henri Lefebvre's idea of place would actually more a appropriate term for such projects. During those 3,5 years, he went to many workshops but almost always felt disconnected with the actual places they happened in. Also Skype and similar technologies are comforting but how far do the connections they provide really go? Marc Tuters' and Kazys Varnelis' essay Beyond Locative Media might provide some clues there. More provocatively formulated: might our view not be class-bound in the first place, flying around the world to funky conferences and workshops with western passports in our pockets while the actual projects often lack connectedness to the local people and a general agenda when they claim to be the opposite? Which representations (knowing that this is a rather old-school term when it comes to art) can locative media offer and how can we make it a kind of multi-agenda-design which does justice to the complexities which are often involved in local communities. He says that his role as an artist would be to find and negotiate these different agendas. One example is the Stockport emotion map which is supposed to show the unique problems as well as the unique possibilities of this area. The bottom line is that it takes real interest to create cultural value. Projects from the 1970s prove that it is not necessarily the technology that makes good projects, it's often everything else that enables structural participation.
Taeyoon Choi is an artist who was educated in Chicago and is currently working in Seoul, South Korea. He says that he's primarily working for people's amusement but actually he's interested in how individual people use technology and how art relates to local culture. With his current work, he's focussing on Korea and the rapid shifts in its culture that are happening at the moment. If you look at critical art in the area you could get the impression that there's no genuinely local issues at the moment (or that a vaguely Asian style just pays of well on global art markets). However, there are big changes going on in Korean society, many of which are related to technology – can that be explored through art? The premier of those technologies is arguably the mobile phone/cameraphone. The discourse about surveillance in public spaces is currently merely a western one, focussed on cameras that are operated by the police or property owners. People are hardly offended by those in Korea but, ironically, the same set of issues is going on around the cameras in mobile phones. Taeyoon is currently addressing this in his project Shoot Me If You Can, a game in urban space where people are running through the city, each equipped with a cameraphone or digital camera. They are divided into teams and are supposed to take pictures of the opposite team's players. When successful, the photo is messaged to the "shot" player and he or she is out. (We tried that during the break, funfun).
This September he will build a gigantic CCTV-beast (!) which 40 people will be able to battle with their mobile phones in a similar manner. Other projects of Taeyoon include the Moveable Types and Instant Spaces at last year's ISEA in San Jose and a very poetic project which comments on the Sampoong department store collapse in 1995 through the absence of mobile phone coverage (= being in the past). Augmented Architecture's Nancy Diniz shows a prototype of their project Life Speculatrix at the Koiwa space, an "evolutionary physical skin based on feedback retrieved locally and globally. Locally it responds to sound, light and proximity of people around it. Globally it responds to RSS/Atom environmental feeds retrieved through the webspace." It is a matrix of shape memory alloy-actuators and will convey attraction and repulsion towards a user in a very slow manner. The discussion after her presentation mainly focussed on the question if this will be readable or will be perceived as randomness. However, slowness is something which is rarely found in interactive projects which often tend to focus on instant gratification of the user in order to seem worthwhile, so this might actually prove to be an interesting strategy for further development of the piece. Finally, Don Belasco Rogers who is also one half of Berlin-based performance artists plan b explained his interest in mapping and the personal geography of cities. To him, they are rather accumulations of events than their hard, concrete surfaces. One of the events which proved that to him was a fire in Clerkenwell, London in which several people were trapped in an illegal porn cinema and killed by the flames. A short while later, every trace of this incident was gone and he realized that this events like these rather live on "in the head and in the body" of the city's inhabitants than anywhere else. The same goes for personal accidents that happened to him throughout London during the time that he had lived there. As Dan puts it, "we're quite soft to mark, whereas the city is rather hard". When he moved to Berlin in 2001, he wondered where those personal stories about London would go, so in order to approach this new city (and to record his London history), he drew a map of such incidents and then matched it with a map of Berlin of the same scale while Picadilly circus and Brandenburg gate served as center points. Like this, he could approximately tell where an incident would have been if it had happened in Berlin instead of London and subsequently documented the sites. For instance the place where he tripped and head-butted a lamp post near Picadilly circus would have been that patch of open space just in front of the Reichstag.
Becoming increasingly interested the city being a "mnemonic place which lives through its story", he developed several pieces and performances which almost all revolve around similar ideas, like Our House or A description of this place as if you were someone else. The latter uses GPS-technology to place stories around Bristol's Queen Square while the user can walk through them and literally "peel back the layers of a city" and a similar way of tracking oneself through satellite is also applied in the project which Dan is exhibiting at Ginza Art Lab, Mapping. For this ongoing practice of "daily mapmaking" (which borrows from Gerhard Richter's practice of daily painting), he basically takes his GPS receiver/recorder whereever he goes to trace his ways and watch himself making new connections. The outcome of this project is really beautiful, intricate maps which look a lot like precisely-drawn, slightly technical maps, unless you zoom in and see the inaccuracies of the GPS which suddenly give them something very handmade. Yet, obviously they haven't been "drawn" in a traditional sense but rather been created by his body's movement through the real space they resemble, so there's a whole host of connotations to be found. So now for every day he is in the city, Dan will update the Tokyo-map with last day's data and it will become more ever more complex as he discovers it. Some impressions of the participants and exhibition spaces on Flickr and in the associated pool. |
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I'm in London for the RCA Degree Show. It's the biggest show ever as they gathered all the departments under one huge tent in the park by the Albert Memorial. I wonder how much of it i'll be able to see. Yesterday evening i managed to get all the information i wanted about only 2 projects before being kicked out of the place by the guys who had to close the place.
Susana Soares studied bees and in particular the way they can be trained to use their smell and detect pretty anything including bombs and landmines. Bees are trained using Pavlov’s reflex to target a specific odour and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins and disease diagnosis. Not only can they roam large distances in search of what you want them to sniff out, it takes only a few minutes to train them, unlike dogs whose training can last up to one year. Their behaviour can be conditioned by rewards such as sugar-water. They are placed in straw-like containers and made to smell a combination of, say sugar with tiny residues of TNT. That's it! The bees' keen sense of smell will then associate the odour of explosives with food.
In her BEE’S project, Susana would use the insects as biosensors, harnessing their extroadinary sense of smell to detect diseases such as lung cancer, skin cancer and tuberculosis. Besides they could spot the problem at a very early stage much better than machines. They could even detect if a woman is pregnant which i find much more appealing and elegant than the usual method that involves peeing on a piece of plastic. The designer visited the London Beekeepers Association and used chewing gum in her tests with the bees. She then located a glass master and had glass objects blown. People would breathe in the glass diagnosis tools where bees are kept for the short period of time necessary for them to detect general health and fertility cycles. To ensure that the mouth never gets in contact with the insect, there are two different spheres, the bee's smell being strong enough to sniff out what you breathe through glass. Bess would rush into the tubes that lead closer to the breath when they detect any disease they associate with food. In her scenario, people would receive trained bees by the post (nothing uncommon here apparently), proceed to the breathe test than release the bees. BEE’S explores how we might co-habit with natural biological systems and use their potential to increase our perceptive abilities. We have always co-existed with these systems, but their potential was unknown. The aim of this project is to develop collaborative relations between scientific and technological research, beekeepers and design, among others, translating the outcome into systems and objects that people can understand and use, engendering significant adjustments.
Smell has become a lost perception: Besides, research has demonstrated that women taking the contraceptive pill decrease their ability to detect odours, prefering genes similar to their own, and eventually choose a mate who is not genetic suitable.
Smell augmentation would be developed gradually through the use of several accessories. Not only new technologies would have to be developed to assist humans in fine-tuning their nose but notions of what is socially acceptable would have to be re-defined. It's not regarded as elegant today to smell the armit of the cute guy standing by you at the bar, right? One of the first step would be to wear the kind of collar shown on the picture above, a kind of sexy accessory that invites your partner to come closer and sniff you. As time passes, people might walk around wearing nose plugs that stimulate the sense of smell, these objects look like delicate pieces of jewellery but later, much later, as human sense of smell is getting stronger, it will be socially acceptable to let long hair grow out of your nose. |
Susana was showing a second project which explores smell as well and forsees the possibility to enhance under-developed (or create) organs of perceptions. 
