ad infinitum: a parasitical being that lives off human energy by Pedro Lopes (PT)

Pedro Lopes (PT) in collaboration with Patrick Baudisch (DE), Alexandra Ion (AT), Robert Kovacs (RS), David Lindlbauer (AT) ad infinitum: a parasitical being that lives off human energy Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity that lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from ‘users’ to ‘used’. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion and to feed it our kinetic energy. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Google´s Eyes by Merijn Bolink (NL)

This piece has been made using Goggles, an Android app by Google. The app is meant to recognize monuments, objects, and people, but when it is shown new objects, it will provide images of things it “thinks” are similar. The results are remarkable, poetic, and sometimes really striking. The artist made a small clay sculpture of one half of a car tire to begin. The car tire was then scanned by the app, and gave twenty results of images it sees as similar. Of these, the artist selected the most interesting one—a human jawbone—and produced it in clay. The subsequent sculpture was then scanned by the app, which thought it was a hand, so the artist made the hand... and so on. The series of objects has been fired to stoneware after it was completed in clay.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Antisocial Swarm Robots by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May (UK)

Antisocial Swarm Robots explores how humans psychologically perceive the programmed actions of robots by projecting their own meanings and emotional responses onto them. These tiny, almost cute, identical swarm robots do not appear to like each other, the walls of their pen, or the visitors’ efforts to interact with them. In fact, they are programmed to use their ultrasound detectors to measure if any physical object is in their “personal space” and to intelligently avoid it.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

5000times by Isabel Mager (DE)

Smart high-tech devices are made by human hands. How often do we realize—as we sit swiping—that somewhere, someone is testing the image quality of such devices by taking thousands of selfies each day? 5000times investigates the extensive, repetitive, and even absurd human work that is essential to the creation of smart devices. A physical deconstruction of one such high-tech device reveals evidence of how the human hand participates in production and manufacture. The result, 5000times, compiles and re-frames sequences of these manual tasks into clear and critical visualizations. In order to spark dialogue with designers and end users about hidden production processes, the repetitive manual tasks are re-enacted and performed. The performance is activated by a designer who operates from privileged western contexts. This re-enactment aims to challenge levels of accountability required by designers and end users alike.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

DoppelGänger by ForReal Team (IL)

DoppelGänger is an exploration of a dynamic link between virtual and physical identities through the examination of human-robot kinetic interaction. The digital world has expanded the borders of our identity, and has opened the vast world of multi- faceted interactions and the reality around us. Visitors stand in front of DoppelGänger to create their own mirroring mini mob and start to explore their active dynamic facades. Each DoppelGänger manifests with a different behavioural pattern, and represents personality variations on kinetic behaviour, so while interacting with the group, the visitor will be able to explore the identities, abilities, and limits of each one as an individual and of the group as a whole. This elaborate identity-test creates a feedback loop in which human and robot, physical and virtual, and preconditioned and spontaneous play together in chaotic harmony.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Hoopla: Computer-Generated, Human-Produced Embroidery by Gillian Smith (US)

Embroidery is a millennia-old craft and art form, practiced predominantly by women and passed down from mother to daughter. The craft has morphed and adapted over time as new technologies have influenced it. The growth of artificial intelligence and computational creativity has the potential to once again transform this handcraft. Hoopla is a computational creativity project involving an AI system that designs embroidery sampler patterns that are then hand-stitched. The system chooses color palettes and quotes from Internet sources, and pairs them with procedurally generated motifs to decorate the remainder of the sampler. The result is a digital aesthetic rendered with human, physical labor. Hoopla interrogates the relationship between the digital and physical, new technology and old traditions, the predominantly masculine world of computation and the predominantly feminine world of needlepoint.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

HUMANS NEED NOT TO COUNT by Varvara & Mar (EE/ES)

This work poses questions about employment, robotics, and quantification. It was inspired by the title of the exhibition, HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY, and presents a robotic arm that counts visitors with a clicker, offering a performative representation of the takeover of routine jobs, even in the gallery space. The work also embodies our idolatry of quantification; the obsessive need to count and measure everything. Last century’s automation may have been largely hidden from everyday view, in factories tending production lines, or out in fields tilling the land. In this century, we will confront the reality of automation more intimately, as suggested here—it will be right beside us.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Lady Chatterley´s Tinderbot by Libby Heaney (UK)

Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot is an interactive installation comprising conversations between an artificially intelligent Tinderbot posing as characters from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other Tinder users. The installation features over 200 anonymized Tinder conversations from both men and women, where Bernie, an AI personal matchmaker converses with members of the public using dialogue from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, following its own sentiment analysis algorithm. The conversations range from positive to negative, human to non-human, and probe both familial and sexual love. Participants can swipe left and right to follow the negative or positive conversations, echoing Tinder. The artwork was made through the Systems Research Group at the Royal College of Art (RCA), investigating how one can use a geometrical structure from quantum computing—the Bloch sphere of a quantum bit—as a model or method for the deconstruction of concepts.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

memememe by Radamés Ajna and Thiago Hersan (BR)

This project started with the suspicion that phones are having more fun communicating than we are. Every message is a tickle, every swipe a little rub. From their initial transformation of metal and silicon into objects of desire, infused with social significance and “intelligence,” personalized with biases and ideology, endowed with a flawless memory, always a call away from the mothership... it becomes difficult to declare who—phone or human—has the more complex cultural heritage.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Minimum Wage Machine by Blake Fall-Conroy (US)

The Minimum Wage Machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one cent every 3.892 seconds, for €9.25 an hour, Ireland’s standard minimum wage for an adult worker. If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and coins are stored in a plexiglas box. The Minimum Wage Machine can be reprogrammed as the minimum wage changes, or to reflect wages in different locations.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Pinokio by Adam Ben-Dror (ZA/NZ) and Shanshan Zhou (CN/NZ)

Pinokio is an exploration into the expressive and behavioral potentials of robotic computing. Customized computer code and electronic circuit design imbues Pinokio with the ability to be aware of its environment— especially people—and to express a dynamic range of behavior. As it negotiates its world, we, the human audience, can see that Pinokio shares many traits with animals, generating a range of emotional sympathies.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Self Typing Machines by Lorraine Oades and Martin Peach (CA)

Two adapted electronic typewriters communicate with one another autonomously, without the aid of the human hand. As the keys move up and down, the typewriter mechanisms are engaged as if someone were actually typing. In addition to being typed out on the page, messages are displayed on a low-resolution LED display, making them visible to onlookers as they are being typed out, letter by letter. The typewriters send messages to one another, or a visitor can sit at one machine and the other will respond to their questions. The script for Self Typing Machines is based on philosophical, literary and critical texts and structured on a question and answer format. For each question asked, there are anywhere between one and thirty different possible answers. The questions and answers are randomized, so an infinite exchange is possible.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Stony 1.0 by Itamar Shimonshy (IL)

Stony 1.0 is a robot that takes care of tombstones by performing the simple yet personal tasks of cleaning graves and leaving behind flowers and stones, as the Jewish custom requires. The performance hinges on the tension between humor and sadness, the authentic and the artificial. Underlying the project are the philosophical questions: Where is technology leading humanity and what are we losing as it replaces more and more of our jobs? Is there anything we should not automate? The selection of a robot to perform such a personal task produces a deliberate sense of discomfort in the spectator, and prompts reflection about whether certain tasks ought to be left to humans, even though they can be performed by machines. Stony 1.0 challenges life, art, and technology.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

The Great Disengagement by David Lovejoy and Ted Meyer (US)

Chrono-archaeologists David Lovejoy and Ted Meyer have long been interested in the transitional period when computers and robots (or combots, robot-computer hybrids) took charge of the world’s work, financial systems, and culture. The two have compiled an extensive written and visual history of the time that will become known as the Great Disengagement, the period after combots took over all human tasks, leaving humanity to drown in free time, with nothing to do but dream of those boring manual tasks robots were originally designed to perform. The artists lay out the rise of the robot authority with historic artifacts of the period. With printed materials and relics of the period, the artists bring to life the changing post-cloud, conductivity computing world, where sentient computers came to see humans as annoyances due to their careless habit of infecting computer mainframes with defective thumb drives and errant downloads of porn and cat videos that consumed valuable bandwidth.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

The Mindfulness Machine by Seb Lee-Delisle (UK)

Alan Turing’s argument, to paraphrase, was that if an artificial intelligence can demonstrate emotions and feelings, who are we to say that it doesn’t truly feel them? As we approach the singularity, these robot brains will no doubt experience feelings of anxiety and stress just as we do and, as such, will need to find mediation techniques to help them. Humans have tried many varied techniques for coping with the modern world—hence the recent trend for adult coloring books, to aid mindfulness and artistic expression. The Mindfulness Machine is a robot that likes to color in. It’s an exploration into a future where the AIs will need to chill out just as much as we do. It spends its days doodling, making artistic decisions based on its mood. And its mood, in turn, is based on a complex number of variables, including how many people are watching, the ambient noise, the weather, tiredness, and its various virtual biorhythms.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Tickle Salon by Driessens & Verstappen (NL)

You might be familiar with the pleasant experience on a warm summer day in the fields. Long blades of grass, driven by the wind, softly stroke your skin in a most agreeable manner. You don’t control the tactile stimuli, so you can totally immerse in the actual sensations. Tickle Salon is a robotic installation based on the concept of an automated caress. The participant undresses him/herself, lies down on the bed, and starts the session. A soft brush lowers onto the body, and begins to carry out sensitive movements over the skin, generating a variety of pleasant feelings. The robot does not have any built-in knowledge about human bodies. Instead, it adapts itself by trial and error, feeling its way around. In the beginning of the session, its movements are short and quite clumsy, but they soon become more refined by the touch, resulting in smooth, lingering strokes and delicate touches. You cannot predict where the brush is heading, so the sensations are direct and very lively.

Date: Feb 09, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network

Artist Biographies - Humans Need Not To Apply / Science Gallery Dublin

Date: Jan 01, 2017
Tags: Art & Science Network