Exhibition
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"Processing Vision" / Toby Collett
OnLine & OnSite: Pioneer robot, video projections and web-based Flash stream
Dates
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17 Nov - 10 Dec
Window OnSite
Foyer of the General Library Building
University of Auckland
Flash stream on Window website
http://www.window.auckland.ac.nz/
Synopsis
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With an eye for spatiality, a pioneer robot with sonar mounts from the Auckland Robot Group is presented by Toby Collett, a PhD Engineering student at the University of Auckland. The robot is the product of the Group's research into robotic vision and navigation, and for the duration of the exhibition has been set the task of roaming around inside Window OnSite generating visual data that is presented on the front of the Window structure via three projections. Glazing has been applied to the glass front of Window OnSite to partially obscure our view of the robot and prioritise the images it is creating, so as to play on a gulf between its means of processing vision and ours. In addition, Window's two spaces have been networked together with data being relayed to the Window website, where a feed of the robot's spatial awareness of its physical environment is mapped within segments of Window's website.
Essay "Processing the Robot" / by Luke Duncalfe:
http://www.window.auckland.ac.nz/robotread.php
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Like the depressed Marvin from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Tony Oursler's screaming avatars, we recognise more of ourselves in the disorders of behaviour than in any representation of personality functioning as personality ought to. The pioneer robot by Toby Collett and the Robot Group is prone to error and lapses of judgment, and its perception is liable to exaggerate its position. Often the robot believes it has passed through a wall as its systems of response misfire. If this robot were a human it would be prone to hyperbole and fantasy.
I describe the robots that seem to understand this idea of errors and lapses of judgment as aiding the replication of personality as hailing from the paranoid android school of behavioural computing; they replicate personality through the embracing of the nativity of their bugs, memory leaks, and the poorly structured systems of their own code. They deny themselves the perfection that their Turing-completeness holds to promise.
We have a history of creating avatars of ourselves through our contemporary technology, though this is perhaps the first time that in seeing ourselves reflected within error prone technology we are identifying ourselves as being less than perfect. Once the operational mechanics of our hearts and circulatory systems were conceptualised through the mechanical workings of hydraulic clocks--you know, they both tick and all so it's perfect--as one example1. And likewise, the BBC tends these days to see ourselves as possessing neurological circuitry akin to networked computing, with neurons being the equivalent of servers; the synapses a kind of Internet. The paranoid android then rests alongside a long history of our borrowing from mechanised automata in order to discover selfhood, of a degree of self-understanding that it seems can only be realised through looking to our artifacts, like an artist who makes sense of their identity through self portrait.
Collett's robot crawls, surveys, guesses and responds as if possessing some low-level intelligence, its dimensions make it the size of a child's toy and we tend to view it as such. Its achievements seem endearing, and its quirks make it all the more so. It feels deflationary to realise that for all its displays of spatial recognition, decision-making, of being a day-dreaming wanderer, it is numeric encoding that comprises its “understanding
