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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
micro.flow
Julius Popp
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As a portrayal of a problem, that of human intelligence within the framework of a senseless robotic being, “micro.flow” addresses how our brains deal with information and the perception of it. It both unfolds the problem of the motorsensory system and how it is able to create a relation or a graphic symbol. Despite its limited output—to pump two liquids that do not mix, and knowing nothing about its own configuration— “micro.flow” is able to watch its own action through a camera, its eye, and to learn from it. In this way, it will eventually come to understand its own body and behavior.
A machine, a tube arranged in a accidental, nonsystematic way, a camera and a computer brain define “micro.flow‘s” components. The machine has a task: to successively inject a colorless and a colored liquid, which do not intersect or mix, into the transparent tube. Thus the process starts, and as the liquids are pumped into the hose, a sequence of colorless and colored sections develop in a totally random, unpredictable way. At the beginning, the system knows nothing about its own body; it can only perform the assigned task and, through a camera, its eye, survey the process.
The video camera motion-tracks the flow, so the machine should be able to build up knowledge of where and how the fluids travel down the tube. As it assigns values to each individual action it has taken, the machine should build a comprehension of the process itself in terms of abstract data. It tries to imagine patterns that should be written in the matrix of the tube and it tries to write these patterns by injecting liquids in a conscious order. Once it is able to recognize its own imagined pattern in the tube, it will use this pattern as a character.
This abstract character is then sent to a second, identically constructed system. Only, the arrangement of the hose is different, though likewise in an absolutely random way. This twin system also tries to convert the transferred information into the same image, but it may be that the matrices of both have hardly anything in common. Obviously, reproduction, negotiation or communication is only possible when there is some common ground. In this communication/negotiation process, both machines can only agree or communicate on basis of a common matrix or territory.
Links: www.sphericalrobots.org
A machine, a tube arranged in a accidental, nonsystematic way, a camera and a computer brain define “micro.flow‘s” components. The machine has a task: to successively inject a colorless and a colored liquid, which do not intersect or mix, into the transparent tube. Thus the process starts, and as the liquids are pumped into the hose, a sequence of colorless and colored sections develop in a totally random, unpredictable way. At the beginning, the system knows nothing about its own body; it can only perform the assigned task and, through a camera, its eye, survey the process.
The video camera motion-tracks the flow, so the machine should be able to build up knowledge of where and how the fluids travel down the tube. As it assigns values to each individual action it has taken, the machine should build a comprehension of the process itself in terms of abstract data. It tries to imagine patterns that should be written in the matrix of the tube and it tries to write these patterns by injecting liquids in a conscious order. Once it is able to recognize its own imagined pattern in the tube, it will use this pattern as a character.
This abstract character is then sent to a second, identically constructed system. Only, the arrangement of the hose is different, though likewise in an absolutely random way. This twin system also tries to convert the transferred information into the same image, but it may be that the matrices of both have hardly anything in common. Obviously, reproduction, negotiation or communication is only possible when there is some common ground. In this communication/negotiation process, both machines can only agree or communicate on basis of a common matrix or territory.
Links: www.sphericalrobots.org
Julius Popp (DE) has exhibited worldwide and has attained several renowned art awards, such as the “Förderpreis der Bildenden Kunst 2008" of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. He is represented in prestigious art collections such as the Saatchi Gallery or the Frac lle-de-France collection. He has been recently commissioned by the NRW Bank, Münster, (DE, BIT.REFLECTION, 1st Prize, 2007) and also by the Waalkalde in Nimwegen, Netherlands (BIT.RECURRENCE, Ist Prize, 2006).