Robots And Avatars » ARTWORKS

Gonçalo Lopes, André Almeida, Francisco Dias, Guilherme Martins

samo — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:05:28 +0000

Despite all the considerable advances in the field of mobile robotics achieved over the last decade, the dream of a more intimate symbiosis between humans and fully autonomous artificial beings is still far from fulfilled. Our claim is that many of these ideas can actually be turned into reality with currently existing technology. We believe that creative use of existing hardware can dramatically extend the relevance and utility of robots in the world and we intend to demonstrate this within two application domains that have the potential to dramatically shift the way we interact with robots today.
The first is to exploit augmented telepresence by using an inexpensive mobile robotic platform such as Magabot (http://magabot.cc/) to give wheels to computer systems. By remotely connecting via Skype to a laptop carried by the robot, the human user will be able to navigate and interact with distant environments, opening the doors to a new kind of cultural exchange in the information age.
The second domain of application is to exploit the vast amount of information our human environment naturally provides to instruct and select appropriate actions in a fully autonomous robot. Our claim is that we can extend this logic to robots to significantly enhance their ability for autonomous behavior, again relying only on currently existing technology. We intend to present a fully functional proof-of-concept of these two application domains using the Magabot robotic platform along with third party and selfdeveloped hardware and software technologies. We will demonstrate robotic telepresence and some simple automatized navigation tasks which can already take away much of the burden of remotely operating a vehicle.

www.magabot.cc

Sašo Sedlaček

samo — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:48:16 +0000

The robot for the materially deprived is constructed entirely from old computer hardware and a few spare parts that can be obtained at no cost. Computers are nowadays more or less treated as basic home equipment and cultural code, no longer reserved for a few privileged individuals as a technology. This is why ‘Žicar’ (Beggar) can step up in the name of the materially deprived, while at the same time preserving their anonymity and dignity. It has access to areas normally off-limits to beggars, such as shopping malls and community events, where the richer part of the society frequents – the part of society that is only able to show some sympathy towards the marginalized if they communicate from a safe distance and via a technological interface.
The past few years have brought about social changes, which have introduced an increasing percentage of poverty into the general picture of the society. Living in poverty or on the fringe thereof are marginalized groups such as impoverished individuals and families, refugees and asylum seekers, elderly people, disabled people… Most of them, hidden from the public view confined in their homes, will never step onto the street to beg, except in most dire circumstances. Because of technology expansion today, there are many new ways of begging; e-mails with spare some change content, begging web sites, multiplayer games begging and a robot for materially deprived.
http://www.sasosedlacek.com/anglesko/projects_beggar.htm

Technical realization of the robot: Pavle & Sašo Sedlaček
Speech: Speaker 1.1 / Synthesizer of Slovene speech, Jure Leskovec, Jozef Stefan Institute
Special thanks: Sipronika d. o. o., KD Group d. d.

Martin Bricelj Baraga

samo — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:21:54 +0000

RoboVox is a large (8 m high) interactive public sound installation, using SMS for general public interaction. It is installed in crowded metropolitan squares preferably on those carrying some social or even political connotation.
The purpose of RoboVox is to serve as a tool for an individual whose voice usually gets lost in the sounds of the mass, the society. An individual can send a text message using his mobile phone to the dedicated RoboVox’s number. Upon receiving the SMS RoboVox will say out loud the statement, protest, declaration of love, or whatever the message may read, thus lending its voice to the anonymous individual. Send SMS to 040-609-739 during the exhibition period.

ROBOVOX AT KIBLA
In the context of Robots and Avatars we are presenting an exclusive hosting of RobVox Prototype, an interactive public installation in the form of a humanoid robot, at KIBLA.

www.robovox.co.uk
www.martinbricelj.com

Martin Hans Schmitt

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 12:05:08 +0000

Genre: non-verbal documentary
Length: 61 min
Production format: Digital Betacam (PAL), 16:9 Widescreen
Director, Editor, Executive Producer: Martin Hans Schmitt
Composer: Matt Howden

Robot world – a meeting with your alternate double
The non-verbal documentary Robot world depicts the evolution of robots from a mechanical somnambulist to an autonomous sensorium. The neoclassical violinist Matt Howden emphasizes the film’s message: these artificial people are our alternate doubles.
Robot world is a compilation. The source material for this one-hour film comes from robot laboratories at universities, from private footage at industrial fairs, military archives and corporate videos from the robot industry. Motion pictures of old 16 mm films from the 1930’s were added. This non-verbal documentary was recycled from far in excess of one hundred hours of raw material.
There is no recognizable narrative structure to Robot world. This non-verbal documentary works with the open structure of a topic’s pattern. This thematic pattern can be found in the individual parts of Robot world and demonstrates that the construction of robots is in fact evolutionary. This applies to both, the exterior as well as the interior level. The exterior evolutionary line of machine beings begins with a “protozoon” in the form of nano-robots, advances to the development of arms, hands and legs as well as to insect-type swarm beings and even develops cold-blooded animals, mammals and humanoid robots. This biological development is accompanied by an imitation of typically human activities such as discovering rooms, being a playmate for children, leading wars or performing operations on a human body. These imitations are like a trace of the interior evolutionary line of robots.
Matt Howden’s music wraps itself around the film; the violin, often linked to the human voice, is here the voice of the robots: their expression, their functionality, and their aspiration.

www.martinhansschmitt.com
http://www.martinhansschmitt.com/robot_world.html

Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana Persico

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:54:19 +0000

Created in occasion of Marshall McLuhan’s Centennial Celebrations, the Electronic Man is a global performance which has managed to create a synthetic digital sense for thousands of people. Stickers with QRCodes and the image of the Electronic Man have been disseminated in cities all over the world. People from all nationalities have agreed to participate to the planetary performance by scanning the codes using their smartphones and contributing their emotional states to the connective body that took shape through their contributions.

As the performance moved along thousands of people downloaded a smartphone application: whenever anyone scans one of the stickers, everyone else’s phone vibrates. A vibration, a physical stimulation right in the pockets of people, stimulating their bodies as a new synthetic sense instantly reacting to a digital interaction happening anywhere in the world. A suggestive example of how technologies can interconnect people from all cultures, nationalities and backgrounds. As of today, whenever anyone scans one of the QRCodes of the performance, around 40 thousand people’s smartphones vibrate, across all continents.

“Electronic man like pre-literate man, ablates or outers the whole man. His information environment is his own central nervous system.” McLuhan in Counterblast, 1969.

The performance has been created by FakePress Publishing and Art is Open Source, with the support of MediaDuemila Magazine and of The University of Rome “La Sapienza”, under the scientific direction of professor Derrick de Kerckhove.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFdRPeQXw00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hHajS-oL5M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj5ecG2CCuQ&feature=related

Aymeric Mansoux, Dave Griffiths, Marloes de Valk

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:36:25 +0000

Naked on Pluto proposes a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/ Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much ‘social software’. The city of ‘Elastic Versailles’ is animated by the quirky combinatorial logics of a community of fifty seven AI bots that glean Facebook data from subscribers to the game. Naked on Pluto’s bot crew, which are hard to distinguish from other agents in this text-based environment, are dysfunctional gatekeepers whose access-control means are broken by the participants only to be elastically “healed” by the bots. Players attempt to override the game’s restrictions, teaming up in order to ultimately crash and escape from the system. Reporting on activities via a blog and Twitter, and issuing a constant stream of incitations to click, declare, poke and buy, the bots run havoc with one’s own and one’s friends’ data, generating more or less spurious links with chillingly escalating speed. Disconcertingly familiar faces and information from one’s personal and associated profiles are indiscriminately blended in a brash prosumer landscape which, like the original Versailles, is designed for promotional parades of inseparable personal and ideological attributes. No player information is shared, stored, or relayed back to Facebook in this malleable social ecosystem where all that counts are glimpses of fleeting visibility.

Naked on Pluto caricatures the proliferation of virtual agents that harvest our personal data to insidiously reshape our online environments and profiles, highlighting the ambivalent hallmarks of major social networks: friends as quantifiable and commodifiable online assets, personas carefully fashioned contrived to impart a sense of ‘intimacy’, and disingenuous publishing of ‘private’ data as self-advertising. The emergence of intelligence in this game is ultimately, hopefully, that of the players who manage to escape from it.

In October 2011, Naked on Pluto was awarded with the VIDA 13.2. prize.

http://pluto.kuri.mu
http://naked-on-pluto.net

Matthieu Cherubini

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:29:37 +0000

rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence(bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users. Social networks are the first medium showing the social success of a person via a statistical way (eg number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter). For many users, reaching the hoped-for success can become a tough and difficult task. Especially when some human factors such as shyness, introversion or personal worthless are present.

The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prosthesis added to an user’s account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.

www.mchrbn.net

Marco Donnarumma

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:25:14 +0000

The work is a seamless mediation between human biosonic potential and algorithmic composition. It defines a temporary cognitive time-zone in which the performance space is augmented, stretched, enlightened, obscured, dominated by a real-time reconstruction of a human body primal expressiveness.

Body is no longer silent, and the embodied interaction which was so far kept mute, now acquires a new textural layer, a tangible and profound level of interpretation and representation which can be at the same time intimately experienced by the performer, and audibly and visually externalized so to embrace the audience.

By enabling a computer to sense and interact with the muscular sonic potential of human tissues, the work approaches the biological body as a means for computational artistry.

“I stand in a dark room, hit with two spotlights. When the visitors enter the room the performance begins. During my performance muscle movements and blood flow produce subcutaneous mechanical oscillations, which are nothing but low frequency sound waves. Two microphone sensors capture the sonic matter created by my limbs and send it to a computer. This develops an understanding of my kinetic behaviour by ‘listening’ to the friction of my flesh. Specific gesture, force levels and patterns are identified in real-time by the computer; then, according to this information, it manipulates algorithmically the sound of my flesh and diffuses it through an octophonic system.

The computer learns about and interact with the performance: for instance, strong and wide movements repeated for longer than 30 seconds prompt the computer to increase the sound loudness and density of the processed output; a repeated excitement of the left bicep causes a rich vibrato; an abrupt contraction of the right forearm moves the sound across the right side of the sonic field. The neural and biological signals that drive the performer’s actions become analogous expressive matter, for they emerge as a tangible haunting soundscape. The border between physical and virtual body is blurred and dissolved; by harvesting pure kinetic energy from corporeal sounds, incarnated gesture and concrete vibrations, the piece actualizes before the audience eyes a visceral and cognitively challenging territory.”

http://marcodonnarumma.com
http://res.marcodonnarumma.com
http://vimeo.com/28417521

Martin Bricelj Baraga, Slavko Glamočanin / MoTA

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:17:50 +0000

Public Avatar is a project documenting the relationship between virtual reality and our perceptions of self and society. This installation will allow a global audience to explore real-world locations remotely, and to interact with objects and people in those locations through real-time control of a human test subject. As digital and physical worlds collide, the boundaries between self and other, reality and simulation are constantly challenged and redefined.

Public Avatar is available online on special events during the year. The dates and times are announced online. To play, you need a computer and an internet connection. During these events, users are able to login at www.public-avatar.com. Each logged in user is placed in a queue and waits for his turn, when he or she can give simple instructions (such as ‘Turn’+’Left’, ‘SAY’+’hello’ etc) to the avatar for a limited time period. Users can see and hear what Public Avatar sees and hears via live video stream.

The term Avatar, meaning a virtual representation of a user, dates as far back as the Ultima series of computer games (1985), and became popularized by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992). It was also in this novel that the term Metaverse (for a 3D virtual-reality version of the Internet) was born. Public Avatar seeks to turn the virtual back into everyday reality, replacing polygons and pixels with a human being in a real-world location, albeit under computer control.

The project explores real virtuality, by which we mean the echo of virtual reality in reality itself. It examines the essence of reality and explores the borders between virtual and real. Presupposing that virtual reality, internet applications, networks and games not only reflect the society and reality, but also predict its development (e.g. Ghost Recon), we can say that Public Avatar explores social reality of the present and the future.

www.public-avatar.com
www.martinbricelj.com
www.motamuseum.com

Mey Lean Kronemann

samo — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:12:24 +0000

robot platform developed by Mey Lean Kronemann and Philipp Urbanz

The lumiBots are a swarm of small, autonomous robots that react to light. Equipped with a UV-LED at their tail, they can leave phosphorescent trails on a glow-in-the-dark mat.
The trails slowly fade away, so that older, darker lines are visible as well as newer, brighter ones. In this way, generative images are created that consistently change.
The lines do not only tell the story of the robots’ movements, but have a deeper meaning for the lumiBots: They can follow the other robots’ as well as their own trails, and amplify them, thus creating an ant-trail-like mechanism.

The behaviour of the lumiBots is not pre-programmed and not predictable. It emerges from the interaction between the robots, influences from their surroundings, and just two simple rules: ‘Go where it is brighter’ and ‘Change direction when the bump sensors are triggered’. Due to small hardware inaccuracies they are all individuals, even though built and programmed the same. The robots do not have a memory chip, but the glowing trails can be seen as a kind of external memory.

The lumiBots are both a science and an art project. They visualize how complexity emerges from simple rules and illustrate the principle that underlies complex systems such as flocks of birds, the weather, or global phenomena.
The system currently consists of nine hemispheric robots of 12 cm diameter in an arena of approx. 1m x 2m in a darkened room.

http://meyleankronemann.de/
http://meyleankronemann.de/lumibots.html
http://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81467670367&coll=DL&dl=ACM&trk=0&cfid=41086476&cftoken=88984411