The Paparazzi Bots (a project by Ken Rinaldo) are a series of five autonomous robots each standing at the height of the average human. Comprised of multiple cameras, sensors and robotic actuators on a custom-built rolling platform, they move at the speed of a walking human, avoiding walls and obstacles while using infrared sensors to move toward humans. They seek one thing, which is to capture photos of people and to make these images available to the press and the world wide web as a statement of culture’s obsession with the “celebrity image” and especially our own images. The flash autonomously goes off, capturing people’s photos and elevating them to “celebrity” in a kind of momentary anointing by the robots. The robots also become celebrities through their association to the “famous people” at the exhibition that are captured by the Paparazzi Bots.

http://www.paparazzibot.com

“Ikea Robotics“, Adam Lassy’s thesis project at ITP, Tisch School of the Arts in New York, is a project where discarded Ikea furniture is modified to create mobile, wireless robots which can sense the spatial needs of it’s owner. The project is both a exploration in dynamic architecture as well as the creation of a systematic process for modifying Ikea pieces that could be expanded upon and proliferated by other users.

“I have chosen Ikea as the furniture platform for this project due it’s ubiquitous presence in living spaces, the fact that it is viewed as “disposable” design in our culture, and the hollow structure of many of the pieces, which allow for easy modification.  I have taken two pieces of furniture: a chair and small table, and modified them with motors and a wireless controller. I have executed a number of studies using cameras or sensors as a feedback to the furniture, to see how it can react to users.”

http://itp.nyu.edu
http://adamlassy.com

Where is your art? is a kinetic sound installation by András Juhász Márton, Melinda Matúz, Gergely Kovács and Barbara Sterk. Once a visitor enters the room hacked toy robots start to chat about art, reading the most recent lines of twitter community. Each tweet that contains the word “art” will be translated with a text to speech software. So the toy robots can talk in tweets about art.

http://pressmeprocess.blogspot.com/
http://kitchenbudapest.hu/en/node/745

Remembrancer, by Alberto Gaitán, is a unique, net-aware sculpture that observes and records data collected over the Internet and sensors within the gallery. Over the first six weeks of the exhibition, (currently on view at Taubam Museum of Art) for 6 hours every day, three networked, robotic painters will deposit dollops of paint on three panels, creating unique paintings in the process. The amount of paint placed at a given moment will be controlled by a computer program that interprets the incoming data. Along with the daily development of these paintings, a field of sound will be similarly generated in response to the same data. The completed panels–displaying an accretion of overlapping monochrome fields of color–will be exhibited over the final two weeks of the exhibition.

http://selforganizingsystem.org

“This piece is ultimately about loss,” explains Gaitán. “Nobody has the capacity for total information awareness so we relinquish big chunks of our understanding to black boxes of knowledge whose provenance we don’t fully understand. We make important decisions and base stacks of assumptions on these. Our memories are rife with inaccuracies, placed there by similar simplification processes that are part of how our minds work. Forgetting or ignoring becomes a significant aspect of remembering.”

Artificial Paradise, Inc., by Jean Paul Frenay, is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

http://www.frenayjp.be

The installation bios [bible] consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text. Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses, bios [bible] produces within seven month continuously the whole book. All 66 books of the bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.
bios [bible] is focussing on the questions of faith and technical progress. The installation correlates two cultural systems which are fundamental for societies today – religion and scientific rationalism. In this contexts scripture has all times an elementary function, as holy scripture or as formal writing of knowledge.
The installation received an Honorary Mention from Prix Ars Electronica 2009, in the Hybrid Art category and it’s currently installed in Linz (Cyberarts exhibition, OK Centrum. 3-09-09 / 4-10-09).

http://www.robotlab.de

“Double-Taker (Snout)” (by Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White) deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood, and autonomous surveillance. The project consists of an eight-foot (2.5m) long industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity. Sited on a low roof above a museum entrance, and governed by a real-time machine vision algorithm, Double-Taker (Snout) orients a supersized googly-eye towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities.

http://www.flong.com/projects/snout/

Remote sonar drawing device, by David Bowen, was a multinational tele-presence robotic installation installed at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón-Asturias, Spain and the Visualization and Digital Imaging Lab, University of Minnesota. This installation consisted of a drawing arm and sonar sensor array installed in Minnesota and a drawing arm and sonar sensor array installed in Spain. The information gathered by the sensors was sent via the internet to the drawing arm in the opposite location. Therefore, the arm in Spain produced drawings based on the inputs it received from the sensor array in Minnesota and vise-versa. The public was encouraged to participate at both locations producing gestural drawings halfway around the world.

www.dwbowen.com

Kunsthaus Graz and the Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel are organising a symposium on the subject of robotics in the context of art. The event will explore the cultural history of the phenomenon, robots in everyday use and the importance of artificial intelligence for the development and self-image of society.
Robot Dreams is a platform for diverse scientists, artists and cultural historians to pursue the social, cultural historical and artistic implications of the subject. The symposium is closely connected with the joint exhibition program the two museums are planning for summer and autumn 2010 likewise focusing on the phenomenon of robotic and art.

http://www.kunsthausgraz.at

www.robotsatplay.dk

[ITALIAN BELOW]

L’opera di Luca Gemma (1961, vive a Bologna) Life Support Machine, inclusa nell’ultima edizione di Ars Electronica e premiata al concorso Life 7.0, propone un nuovo paradigma nel rapporto uomo-macchina. L’effetto del movimento ondeggiante e il sonoro acquatico della sua macchina, produce relax e distensione mentale.
La macchina, con la quale l’utente viene fisicamente a contatto, gestisce, tramite un meccanismo motorizzato, il movimento di grandi “ali” plastificate. Lo sfregamento di migliaia di squame di pesce, fissate sulle facciate delle plastiche, è provocato meccanicamente in modo da produrre il suono della risacca. Il suono delle onde che rifrangono sulla spiaggia è reso attraverso tre movimenti comandati dal software appositamente creato. I fenomeni che producono le cause del suono sono stati scomposti in dati successivamente digitalizzati in modo da essere compresi dal computer. Ma è un materiale organico che produce il suono percepito, grazie ad un approccio conoscitivo che è ancora analogico.
Un’installazione ibrida che fonde organico e tecnologico, analogico e digitale, mixando e confondendo sensorialità e astrazione concettuale.

http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/paginas/v7/emachine.html
http://www.8lab.it/lucagemma.html

Douglas Irving Repetto, l’artefice di Artbot, Dorkbot e organism guiderà un particolare laboratorio a Berlino, l’Electromechanical Mandala workshop. I partecipanti collaboreranno alla creazione di una grande scultura elettromeccanica utilizzando scarti tecnologici abbandonati. Ciascun partecipante creerà una parte della scultura, e tutte le sezioni verranno collegate in modo tale da formare un oggetto simile ad un mandala. Ognuno avrà libertà di scelta nel creare la propria sezione in base ai propri interessi: attrezzature musicali, sculture cinetiche o macchinari per il disegno sono alcuni esempi dei possibili progetti. Al termine del laboratorio la scultura verrà smontata e le parti riciclate. Il corso è aperto a tutti gli artisti, scultori, musicisti, designer, performer e si svolgerà presso l’università delle Arti UdK di Berlino dal 24 settembre al 1 ottobre 2005.

(lino trinchini)

http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/index.shtml
http://www.udk-berlin.de/
http://artbots.org/2005/
http://dorkbot.org/

http://artbots.org/2005

E’ stato per 9 anni uno dei progetti più noti e amati della net art. Nell’agosto 2004 Telegarden di Ken Goldberg, che consentiva ai navigatori di controllare via web un giardiniere robotico, e quindi di curare un piccolo giardino a distanza, è andato offline, ma Goldberg non ci ha fatto sentire a lungo la sua mancanza. Il mese successivo è stato lanciato infatti un nuovo community project, Demonstrate.
Il lavoro nasce in occasione del quarantesimo anniversario del Free Speech Movement, che ha avuto origine nella Sproul Plaza di fronte all’Università di Berkeley, dove Goldberg insegna. Da allora, la Sproul Plaza è uno spazio tradizionale di manifestazioni e di attivismo legato alla libertà di parola. Come in Telegarden, Goldberg ha scelto di puntare una webcam sulla piazza, ma l’utente passa dallo stato idilliaco di giardiniere alla condizione del sorvegliante, il cui compito è tenere sotto controllo le erbacce.
Il progetto, ora concluso, ha attirato 4000 utenti, che potevano muovere la webcam, zoomare sulla piazza e fare fotografie che venivano archiviate sul sito, ma anche chattare con gli altri utenti e annunciare eventuali momenti “caldi”: permettendo in questo modo di fare il punto sulla discussione sulla libertà di espressione a quasi mezzo secolo dalla nascita del movimento, in un’epoca il cui il controllo diventa sempre più efficace, pervasivo e invisibile.
Il 22 aprile, Goldberg discuterà Demonstrate al Centre d’Art Santa Monica di Barcellona, in una conferenza introdotta da Roberta Bosco. Se vi trovate da quelle parti…

(domenico quaranta)

http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art
http://demonstrate.berkeley.edu

Nullpointer