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Tuesday 22 March 2011

Robox Ep4-Establishing Meaning (Psyche)

So I've delved into where we're going with the Robox briefly, but I'd like to go into more detail concerning the running theory behind what it's trying to demonstrate. It gets a bit fluffy (it's late, and I've drank too much caffeine) so skip this one if you want to avoid the 'mind-f**k'.

Essentially to me it started off as a duality thing, a coexistence between the robot and the programmer. The robot is dependent on the instructions, without these he is incapable of anything at all. On the other hand though the programmer does not create anything at all, the body of work itself is all produced by the robot. This idea would be conveyed with the two canvases, the vivid showing man's direct input, whilst the paint shows man's ultimate vision. The robot executes this on its own terms therefore creating a partnership.


This concept of mutual dependence in technological creativity was similarly detailed by one of our guest speakers in Creative Studio I Greg Bennett on the subject of both video games as an art-form, and artistic production using technology as a medium: "The Video Game creates a universe that the player is constantly developing an understanding of through interaction, in the hopes of mastering its logic. The game itself is a representation of someone else' understanding of the world around them. The game's systems are only programmed logic obtained via interaction with the programmer." (potentially a very blurred quote but on the right track) also when working with technological mediums such as creating animations on Maya, Greg Bennett touched on the idea of a co-operative effort between man and intelligent tool producing results. Both contributing but both dependent on each other to create a body of work.

However that being said, contribution and artistic direction is still one-sided. Art cannot truly be made by a robot, only executed. Contrary to the idea of a partnership, the robot is at it's core still just a tool. It no more creates the art we produce than the laptop I'm using wrote this blog. Again, another of our guest speaker's, Nikola Kasabov touched on a similar topic when discussing A.N.N. regarding the development of Artificial Intelligence.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network)

Our group pieced together this explanation for what we hope to demonatrate with our final body of work:

"Art cannot be created by robots. This is because art is the expression/communication of an idea, thought or feeling. The robot can only see the world as data and express predetermined actions. With our experiment we wanted to use the robot as a an interactive tool to produce art for human interpretation by having it respond to realtime data in a random way. We wanted to emphasize the difference between the 'black and white' data that the robot sees and what we see as people. Also because art is a communication of an idea we wanted to be able to communicate through the robot and decided that since ultimately we are using human interaction to create something for human interpretation then we should us human communication to do this. So we decided to use sound as the main from of interaction. To accomplish all these things we came up with the concept of creating two images at once. The first would be the robots direct response to data and the other an artistic creation using the robot as a tool. To do this we came up with the concept of putting the robot in a box and drawing on two canvas' at the same time. Thus letting us show a physical division between the robots world and ours, as well as a visual one. On the ceiling of the box the robot draws in black vivd constantly, which effectively traces its path and shows the 'black and white' data we wanted to show. On the floor of the box the robot would disperse and distribute paint on top of paper. The resulting two images would then be compared and overlaid to further express the difference and union of data expression and human interpretation."

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