SOFT CONTROL: Art, Science and the Technological Unconscious

Part II: Top-Down

Maribor

November 15, 2012

Opening day: Thursday, November 15 at 7 p.m.
Portal – Valvazorjeva 40, Maribor, Slovenia
7 p.m. AI robots performance The Tiller girls by Louis-Philippe Demers (SG), Phillip Schulze (DE) and Armin Purkrabek (DE)
8 p.m. Opening

OPENING PERFORMANCE

Thursday, November 15, 2012
time: 7 p.m.

Louis-Philippe Demers (SG)
AI robots performance, 2010
Music: Phillip Schulze.
Lighting: Armin Purkrabek

Louis-Philip Demers’s project explores the phenomenon of unconscious bodily matter. Whether it makes up complex figures at stadiums and during military parades, or demonstrates cohesion in corporate labor – its programs are executed with the same mechanical precision. The precursor was the famous early 20th century dance troupe “Tiller Girls”, in which human performers are ‘called upon to exercise their technical skills but not their interpretive skills’.

Demers’s performance is a group of 12 small autonomous robots. These robots were developed in Artificial Intelligence for the study of gaits given minimal freedom of movements. The rationale behind the Tiller Girls is to explore the dichotomy of the man-machine. The robots can only balance their torsos and shoulders but they can yet achieve a large variety of expressions and behaviours.