This book challenges the conventional dualistic binary skill vs intelligence. It seeks to revalorize skill qua cognition. A philosophical historiography reveals the culturally contingent and historically constructed nature of conventional philosophical concepts that bear on the subject – primarily notions of mind, consciousness, and mental capacities. Acknowledging the slippage from mind/body to brain/body dualism, I pursue a reconceptualisation of neurophysiology that is holistic and non-dualist. A new approach to embodied skilled practices is then formulated, rooted in a non-dualist approach to neurophysiology - that necessarily reconfigures concepts of skill, intelligence and cognition. On the basis of this, (cognitive) qualities of situated skilled practices are explored, delving into specialised topics and case studies. This leads into a discussion of pedagogies for skilled practices and the place of skilled practices in broader pedagogical contexts. This in turn leads into discussions of work and learning in digital environments.
I analyze online pedagogy and research from an embodied and enactivist perspective, assessing the different qualities of sensorimotor engagement in screen-based activities as opposed to hands-on experiences. I argue that “knowing” is grounded in sensorimotorically multimodal embodied experiences, and recognize the limitations in the sensorimotor ecologies of online phenomena.
Some six to ten thousand years ago, humans migrated from Southeast Asia and populated the myriad islands of the vast Pacific Ocean. Their voyaging and maritime technologies were unique and unparalleled elsewhere, and evolved over time into specialised local knowledge. While the catamaran-style vessels of the eastern Pacific have received global exposure, the other remarkable and multiple vessel design evolutions that occurred across the Pacific are less well illuminated in the literature. We use the examples of the drua class of vessel that emerged in central Oceania, including Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, and the TePuke of Taumako in the Solomon Islands to illustrate how technologies evolved and became attuned to various maritime and terrestrial environments, adapting to and exploiting local materials, tools, and weather and ocean conditions.
Today, the ancestors of these master navigators and naval architects are facing the greatest threat to their existence, a growing global climate emergency. Contemporary Oceania is beset by challenges arising from an unfortunate trifecta: the decline of Indigenous practice and knowledge due to the arrival and subsequent colonisation by outsiders from the Western world over the last 400 years, a lack of adequate and affordable sea transport systems that support economic or sustainable development, and climate change. This chapter alerts readers to the urgency of rescuing and re-establishing Indigenous sciences, sailcraft design, seafaring traditions, and voyaging practices for reasons of both cultural preservation and future sustainability. In this troubled context, important lessons can be distilled from Pacific Indigenous maritime technologies to inform and inspire current and future generations as they seek to develop decarbonised shipping solutions to provide essential connectivity across atolls, islands and archipelagos in an increasingly climate challenged ocean.
This paper reflects on the qualities of living and learning in digital cultures, the design of digital technologies and the philosophical history that has informed that design. It takes as its critical perspective the field of embodied cognition as it has developed over the last three decades, in concert with emerging neurophysiology and neurocognitive research. From this perspective the paper considers cognitive, neurological and physiological effects that are increasingly becoming noticed in user populations, especially young populations. I call this class of conditions ‘sensorimotor debility’, in order to distinguish it from other psychological, social, cultural, and political symptoms associated with computer, internet and social media use.
This paper seeks to understand the skills of operating automated manufacturing machines of the C19th as craft practices, employing externally powered and automated tools around which new cultures of practice emerged. We draw upon situated/embodied/enactive/extended/distributed (SEEED) approaches to cognition to explicate the sensibilities of these practices, as well as the history of science and technology, Anthropology, STS and related fields. Our case study is a body of work focused on embodied/ embedded knowledge in the textile industry – specifically in the making of machine lace. We conclude with a proposal for multi-modal museum exhibits that provide an understanding of know-how, kinesthetic/proprioceptive skills and procedures. The authors are both long term practitioners of crafts, both traditional and industrial (see biogs). This experience informs the research at every step.
Micronesian traditional canoe carvers of Lamotrek Atoll are one of the few Pacific communities whose canoe carving, ocean seafaring and indigenous navigation techniques are living traditions. They sail long distances on open ocean in these craft without instruments or maps, using traditional navigation techniques. Their building procedures involve no plans, no measuring devices or numbers. This kind of indigenous boatbuilding and seafaring was once practiced by virtually all Pacific island communities over hundreds or thousands of years, but the traditional knowledge has been eradicated in all but the most isolated and impoverished communities.
Envisioning Robots in Society – Power, Politics, and Public Space is the third event in the Robophilosophy Conference Series organized by Research Unit for Robophilosophy, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark.
The practices of the arts –plastic and performing - deal in direct sensorial engagement with the body, with materiality, with artifacts and tools, with spaces, and with other people. The arts are centrally concerned with intelligent doing. Conventional explanations of the cognitive dimensions of arts practices have been unsatisfying because internalist paradigms provides few useful tools to discuss embodied dimensions of cognition.
Conventional internalist conceptions of cognition can say little which is useful about the kinds of sensorimotor integration which are fundamental to action in the world, and practices of the arts epitomize and refine these sensorimotor intelligences to a high degree. In doing so, arts practices implicitly refute the paradigmatic separation of matter and information, of mind and body. Thus, internalist paradigms only confuse attempts to discuss creative intelligent practice. This explanatory crisis has hobbled useful discussion of cognition and the arts for much of the last century.
Happily, concepts arising from the post-cognitivist paradigms which have emerged over the past 30 years provide leverage on the qualities of intelligent action in the world - which is what artists do. Here I will explore how we might deploy concepts arising in Situated, Enactive, Embodied and Distributed paradigms (SEED) and explain how these fields can provide the basis for a new discourse on arts practices which in the words of Maxine Sheets Johnstone, gives the body its due. Or rather, begins by refuting mind-body dualism, acknowledges the performative, the processual and the relational dimensions of practice.
While Daniel Dennett’s writing always addresses big questions, the reach of From Bacteria to Bach is audacious. His goal – to explain the emergence of mind as a biological (and postbiological) phenomenon, beginning from first principles, ie protolife. In this work, Dennett is to be commended for his combination of broad scholarly reach combined with readability. Dennett has no need to awe and obfuscate with neologisms or obscure terminology. A thoughtful high school student could get most of this. While humanists have sneered at his scientism, from this reviewer’s point of view, he negotiates the hoary old two cultures problem with generosity and finesse. Throughout, Dennett maintains a (qualified) posthumanist stance. He argues, quite reasonably, for human-exceptionalism in terms of our mental capabilities, but, human-exceptionalist as he is, he is emphatically biologically materialist on the matter of mind and maintains that he is also non-dualist (more in this below).
Part one is plain sailing (Dennett likes his maritime metaphors and so do I) an easy argument about evolution where he frames up the book, anchoring (heh heh) his argument in the idea of evolution as ‘mindless’ R+D, searching the design-space of possibilities for local optima. A guiding notion throughout the book is that this evolutionary process creates competence without comprehension (refuting creationists along the way). This ‘strange inversion of reason’ in both Darwin and Turing, is a theme to which he returns regularly. Competence without comprehension depends in turn on another key concept ‘free floating rationales’. Dennett expresses some regret at the naming of this idea, and I stumbled on the terminology ‘free floating rationales’ every time, but I get the concept, and I think it is useful. A ‘free floating rationale’ is a ‘reason’ in the logic of evolutionary design, that determines a quality or capability of an organism, without the organism knowing it.
Introduction
As I write this in 2011, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that after a couple of decades
of explosive development in new media art–or "digital multimedia" as it used to be
called–in screen-based as well as "embodied" and gesture-based interaction, there
seems not to have been much advance in the aesthetics of interaction. At the same time,
interaction schemes and dynamics once only known in obscure corners of the world
of media art research/creation have found their way into commodities from 3-D TV
and game devices (Wii, Kinect) to smartphones (iPhone, Android). While increasingly
sophisticated theoretical analyses (from Lev Manovich to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun to
Mark Hansen, and more recently Nathaniel Stern among others) have brought diverse
perspectives to bear, I am troubled by the fact that we appear to have advanced little
in our ability to qualitatively discuss the characteristics of aesthetically rich interaction
and interactivity–not to mention the complexities of designing interaction as artistic
practice–in ways that can function as a guide to production as well as a theoretical
discourse. This essay is an attempt at such a conversation.
Abstract. Robotic Art and related practices provide a context in which real-time computational technologies and techniques are deployed for cultural purposes. This practice brings the embodied experientiality, (so central to art) hard up against the tacit commitment to abstract disembodiment inherent in the computational technologies. In this essay I explore the relevance of post-cognitivist thought to robotics in general, and in particular, questions of materiality and embodiment with respect to robotic art practice – addressing philosophical, aesthetic-theoretical and technical issues.
Introduction
Brautigan's poem might be the root document of the San Francisco hippy techno-utopian movement which spawned the Whole Earth Catalog and Apple Computer, which Theodor Rosak described in his essay From Satori to Silicon Valley, (Roszak) and which was later dubbed 'California Ideology' by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. But what Brautigan et al probably could not conceive of was the wholesale reconfiguration of society and economy which would necessarily attend the infiltration of computing into diverse aspects of life. Typical of that context – the era of the 'giant brains' – is his portrayal of computers as coexisting but separate.
Abstract.
This paper describes the development of several interactive installations and robotic artworks developed through the 90s and the technological, theoretical and discursive context in
which those works arose. The main works discussed in this paper are Petit Mal (1989-95), Sympathetic Sentience (1996-7), Fugitive I (1996-7), Traces (1998-9), and Fugitive II (2001-4) – full
documentation at (www.simonpenny.net/works). These works were motivated by a critical analysis of cognitivist computer science, which contrasted with notions of embodied experience arising
from the arts. The works address questions of agency and interaction, informed by Cybernetics and Artificial Life.
Introduction.
The term "Artificial Life" arose in the late 1980s as a descriptor of a range of (mostly) computer based research practices which sought alternatives to conventional *Artificial Intelligence (henceforth AI) methods as a source of (quasi-) intelligent behavior in technological systems and artifacts. These practices included reactive and bottom-up robotics, computational systems which simulated evolutionary, genetic processes and animal behavior, and a range of other research programs informed by biology and complexity theory. A general goal was to capture, harness or simulate the generative and "emergent" qualities of "nature" – of evolution, co-evolution and adaptation. *"Emergence" was a keyword in the discourse. Techniques developed in Artificial Life research are applied in diverse fields, from electronic circuit design to animated creatures and crowds in movies and computer games. Historically, Artificial Life is a reaction to the failures of the cognitivist program of AI and a return to the biologically informed style of Cybernetics. Artificial life was also informed by various areas of research in the second half of the twentieth century– as discussed below.
Introduction
Computer-articulated interactive art is diversely multimedia, involving technologies of sound and image, as well, commonly, as electro-mechanical, robotic, and lighting systems: an interactive Gesamtkunstwerk. Designing interaction is a qualitatively new aesthetic practice which is dependent on real-time computing technologies that have only been available for about a generation. Embodied interaction is a specialized aspect of interactive art practice which acknowledges the primacy of physical embodiment and sensorial experience in computer-based interaction. Embodied interaction refers specifically to sensor-driven, computationally articulated artworks which behave in response to the behavior of human participants. In order to elaborate the notion of an aesthetics of embodied interaction, it is necessary to provide some theoretical and historical context.
Over the last two decades, availability of real-time computational technologies (hardware, software and peripherals) have permitted the development of categorically new kinds of cultural practices in which the machine system is constituted as a quasi-organism which responds to changes or perturbations in its ‘umwelt’, according to behavioral rules (most often) contrived by the artist/author. Such systems are found in ‘new media’ forms such as online interactive worlds, augmented and mixed reality work, locative media and fully physically embodied interactive installation and performance - in single and multiple participant, discrete and distributed modalities. They conform to, or derive from musical, literary, theatrical and plastic arts genres, but the fundamental creative/technical practices of designing behaviors and implementing machine perception is largely without precedent in such arts traditions. This paper proposes that a source for relevant aesthetic theory might be found in the improvisational forms which often exist as essential but informal dimensions of traditional arts practices and their knowledge bases. Within computational discourses and practices around the formal capabilities of computational systems there is a long and relevant history of discussion of questions of creativity, novelty and emergence. Computer based interactive art practices and traditions of improvisation thus provide as heterogenous an interdisciplinary polyglot as one could wish for. This paper explores that territory.
Abstract
The computing revolution has had multiple impacts on the arts. This paper follows three related strands of techno-cultural development relate to the interactions between computing and arts practices over the last quarter century. The first strand, aesthetico-theoretical in nature, is recognition of the radically new kinds of cultural practices made possible by real time computing (especially interactive practices) and the complementary recognition that new modes of performative and relational aesthetics are called for. The second strand concerns the tacit or covert incursion of ideologies of computing into arts practices and the possibility that such ideologies may have had the pernicious effect of devaluing or disenfranchising, or simply rendering invisible or irrelevant, traditional practices and values which themselves may have been inadequately or poorly explicated. The third strand tracks the collapse of the cognitivist and simplistically Cartesian worldview around which 'good old fashioned artificial intelligence' (GOFAI) and cognitive science were framed, and the emergence of situated, embodied, enactive and distributed paradigms of cognition.
Introduction.
Interdisciplinarity is a theme which dances around pedagogy and research, often in vogue, and lauded as a wellspring of innovation. Regrettably, just as often, the term is leveraged in initiatives which employ the term in limited or even counterproductive ways. The first question that must be asked of any such enterprise is why is the term being deployed and to what ends. The first observation that must be made is that interdisciplinarity is a symptom of disciplines. The idea that disciplines and disciplinary boundaries are somehow pure or stable and divide up the pie of human knowledge in ordered and rational ways for all time is of course nonsense. Disciplines are historically contingent, they rise and fall and change and adapt. Disciplines embrace fractious factions within them, and are defined in heterogenous and incompatible ways, by subject matter, by methodology, by philosophical orientation. Disciplines overlap, they share content, they share methods. The dotted lines that ostensibly separate disciplines are blurred and overlap. New disciplines come into existence, usually through the process of interdisciplinary formations. They usually come into existence due to a principled recognition that existing formation are not adequate to the task at hand. The emergence of fields such as computer science and women's studies are examples of the recent past. Media Arts and sustainability are more contemporary cases.
Introduction – After Virtuality
I have argued elsewhere that the discourses of technological virtuality during the 1990s were in part the result of the effects of an incomplete technology. The transition from the period of virtuality to the period of ubiquity was a result of the maturation of interface technologies missing from the technological palette of the 90s. In the interim, a variety of technologies linking the dataworld with the lived physical world have emerged. Small and large scale sensing and tracking technologies such as MEMS accelerometers, machine vision, laserscanners, GPS, RFID, and mobile communications technologies have been developed and deployed. This has had the effect of nesting the 'virtual' back into the lived physical world. This belated integration of data with the world has caused 'the Virtual' to evaporate. The Virtual has become doubly virtual, revealing it to be a panic around an explosive and messy technological transition period.
Introduction.
In order to adequately position an intellectual history of a hybrid such as Artificial Life Art, it is necessary to draw lines through and between various histories in unorthodox ways. Discussions regarding the historical and theoretical origins of Artificial Life Art usually refer to the blossoming of the interdisciplinary scientific field of Artificial Life in the early 1990s. Here, I look back to the mid-century period to find forces which helped to form Artificial Life Art practices. In what follows, I will discuss post-war art practices and post-war technological practices together and in parallel. It is not possible to build a full sense of the intellectual patrimony of Artificial Life Art without such a double approach.
Excerpt – My argument here today is that the intelligences of the arts are largely or primarily, the kinds of bodily intelligences of which the essence remains incommensurable with text and spoken language. Historically, the upshot of this has been bad for the Arts, at least in the modern period. As western science and western culture increasingly has dealt in the currency mathematical and linguistic symbolic abstraction (numbers and letters) so increasingly, the conception of intelligence has been framed in these terms. By this token, the arts have been marginalized. One can be 'stupid like a painter' but not 'stupid like a mathematician'. This trend has been reinforced by a vein of stubborn anti-intellectualism in the arts.
Abstract.
This paper pursues the intertwined tracks of robotics and art since the mid 20th century, taking a loose chronological approach that considers both the devices themselves and their discursive contexts. Relevant research has occurred in a variety of cultural locations, often outside of or prior to formalized robotics contexts. Research was even conducted under the aegis of art or cultural practices where robotics has been pursued for other-than-instrumental purposes. In hindsight, some of that work seems remarkably prescient of contemporary trends. The context of cultural robotics is a highly charged interdisciplinary test-environment in which the theory and pragmatics of technical research confronts the phenomenological realities of physical and social being-in-the-world, and the performative and processual practices of the arts. In this context, issues of embodiment, material instantiation, structural coupling, and machine-sensing have provoked the reconsideration of notions of (machine) intelligence and cognitivist paradigms. The paradoxical condition of robotics vis-à-vis artificial intelligence is reflected upon. This paper discusses the possibility of a new embodied ontology of robotics that draws upon both cybernetics and post-cognitive approaches.
Abstract.
This paper places contemporary modalities of digital interaction in an historical context of sixty years of intersections between technological development and artistic experimentation. Specific technological developments are identified as context-defining historical markers and specific works are discussed as exemplars of significant milestones in the engineering and the aesthetics of interaction. The shortage of theorisation of non-instrumental interaction is lamented. The process of naturalisation to increasingly sophisticated digital tools and appliances in the current period of ubiquitous computing is noted. A number of theoretical issues are drawn out and discussed in terms of cognitive and sensorimotor dynamics. Woven through the discussion is the proposal that a synthesis of performance theory and neuro-cognitive studies might provide a basis for a performative ontology around which an aesthetics of interaction might be constructed. As the paper progresses a theoretical framework for an ontologically performative aesthetics of interaction and ubiquity is formulated.
Abstract
This essay provides an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, elaborating on the way that such experimental practices have increasingly become standard components of digital cultural practices and commodities. The paper offers some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s which informed such practices. The essay takes four relatively recent semi-autonomous behaving artworks: Propagaciones, by Leo Nuñez; Sniff by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; Universal Whistling Machine by Marc Boehlen and Performative Ecologies by Ruari Glynn works as representative of the current status of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art.
Abstract
It was not until the late 1980s that the term 'Artificial Life' arose as a descriptor of a range of (mostly) computer based research practices which sought alternatives to conventional Artificial Intelligence methods as a source of (quasi-) intelligent behavior in technological systems and artifacts. These practices included reactive and bottom-up robotics, computational systems which simulated evolutionary and genetic processes, and are range of other activities informed by biology and complexity theory. A general desire was to capture, harness or simulate the generative and 'emergent' qualities of 'nature' – of evolution, co-evolution and adaptation. 'Emergence' was a keyword in the discourse. Two decades later, the discourses of Artificial Life continues to have intellectual force, mystique and generative quality within the 'computers and art' community. This essay is an attempt to contextualise Artificial Life Art by providing an historical overview, and by providing background in the ideas which helped to form the Artificial Life movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This essay is prompted by the exhibition Emergence – Art and Artificial Life (Beall Center for Art and Technology, UCI, December 2009) which is a testament to the enduring and inspirational intellectual significance of ideas associated with Artificial Life.
This text is an edited version of an interview conducted by Jihoon Felix Kim at the International Symposium on Art and Technology, Korea National University of the Arts, Seoul, Korea, November 2008. Transcribed by Kristen Galvin, edited by Kristen Galvin, and Simon Penny. 2008-2010.
This article discusses technological and discursive developments in the interdisciplinary historical trajectory of theory and practice of digital cultures in the 1990s, specifically around the notion of virtuality and the transition to the paradigm of ubiquitous computing. 2010.
This essay is an attempt to contextualise Artificial Life Art by providing an historical overview, and by providing background in the ideas which helped to form the Artificial Life movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. based life-forms. Unfortunately but inescapably, such debate was often muddied by Extropian rhetoric asserting that in computers and robotics, humans were building the machine successors to biological (human) life. 2009.
The emergence of media-arts and digital cultural practices has provided a highly charged context for the development of interdisciplinary pedagogy, combining as it does, practices and traditions from historically, culturally and theoretically wildly divergent disciplines. This paper addresses aspects of effective interdisciplinary educational process, attending to questions of pedagogy, theory and institutional pragmatics. 2008.
This text is the final section of the paper Rigorous Interdisciplinary Pedagogy five years of ACE in its original version and focuses on the specifics of the implementation of the ACE program at the University of California Irvine. 2008.
This paper is concerned with the nature of traditions of Arts practice with respect to computational practices and related value systems. At root, it concerns the relationship between the specificities of embodied materiality and aspirations to universality inherent in symbolic abstraction. This tension structures the contemporary academy, where embodied arts practices interface with traditions of logical, numerical and textual abstraction in the humanities and the sciences. 2007-08.
The goal of this paper is to assert the historical validity of a consistent tradition of practice which exploits emerging electronic and mechanical technologies for cultural purposes. Due to its inherently interdisciplinary nature, this tradition can be fully understood neither within the terms of conventional art historical discourse nor within the terms of discourses of technological research and development. 2005-08.
The goal of this paper is twofold, academic and activist. The academic goal is to attempt to enhance critical discussion of interactive media practice and interactive media cultural practice by introducing a consideration of the implications of embodied involvement in the process. The activist dimension arises from this, and raises a question of ethical responsibility regarding cultural objects which might function as training environments to build behaviors which will ultimately be expressed in the real world. 2004.
Human culture, and western culture in particular, is in a process of radical change due to the development of digital technologies. It is characteristic of cultural practices that emerging technologies are rapidly colonised and tested. A diverse range of new digital cultural practices are currently emerging. This cultural change demands new types of educational programs in order to train new types of professionals. Such educational programs will combine existing disciplines in new ways and will also include new emerging contexts, new technique and new practices. 2003.
Traces (1998-9) is an artwork for the CAVE that uses a novel machine vision system to enable unencumbered full body interaction with a range of semi-autonomous agents without the imposition of any sort of textual, iconic or encoded-gestural interfaces and without physically restrictive wiring, pointing devices, or headgear. Furthermore, Traces does not consist of a world which is navigated; instead, the movement of the user through the space leaves volumetric and spatial-acoustic residues of user movement which slowly decay. This project was motivated by a desire to explore and critique four central issues in contemporary HCI: (a) embodied interaction with computational systems; (b) rapid and transparent learning of interfaces by untrained users (the autopedagogic interface); (c) immersive bodily interaction with software agents, (d) extension and elaboration of the general conception of interactivity itself. 2001.
In a flurry of activity in the late sixties, Jack Burnham wrote three substantial art-theoretical works: Beyond Modern Sculpture (subtitled: The effects of Science and Technology on the sculpture of this century), The Structure of Art and Great Western Saltworks (subtitled: essays on the meaning of post formalist art) . "The tools of scholarly criticism- stylistics, iconographical analysis, historical context, and formal analysis in the last fifty years- remain as trusted now as ever. Yet they explain with diminishing clarity what has happened after 1800, and almost nothing of what has happened in sculpture in the last sixty years. I am sure that my lack of success with the tools of art scholarship is in part responsible for the present book. Had the tools served their purpose, I might not have sought others less respected." Jack Burnham, BMS. 1999.
My intention in this essay is to discuss agent building from the perspective of the visual arts. I will argue for the value of artistic methodologies to agent design. I will not advance some futuristic version of the romantic bohemian artist, agonising over an expressionistic agent in his garret. Nor will I propose the harnessing of artistic minds to the industrial machine. I want to advance another argument which is pertinent specifically to the building of Social Agents. I propose that there are aspects of artistic methodology which are highly pertinent to agent design, a which seem to offer a corrective for elision generated by the often hermetic culture of scientific research. 1999.
More than one commentator has identified "computer art" as the last bastion of modernism. It has been, by and large, a fairly aesthetised and de-politicised affair. This is all the more strange since the practice arose during a time when activist, socially engaged art practice became a major movement. On the other hand, it is not surprising given that half the impetus for the practice came from the discipline of computer science, which, having made its Faustian bargain with the military-industrial complex, is condemned to permanent erasure of social conscience. 1998.
When artists engage electronic and particularly digital tools, a negotiation occurs between methodologies of traditional art practice and the value system inherent in the tools themselves. This negotiation is implicit and rarely discussed. The nature of artistic practice, the artistic product and the consumption of the work is thereby changed and is at variance with conventional understandings in pre-electronic artwork. The goal of this essay is to make explicit some of the characteristics of the value system which structures these new tools and thus the nature of the negotiation that is taking place, on the level of both individual practice and historical trend. The virtualisation of artistic practice by the use of simulatory tools implies the eradication of kinesthetic or somatosensory awarenesses and skills. I will argue that an holistic relation to the self (mind/body) is central to traditional artistic practice, but that the philosophical tradition around which the computer is built inherently affirms the Cartesian duality. Contrary to the popular rhetorics of 'convergence', a dramatic philosophical collision is occurring because the goals and methods of the discipline of engineering are at odds with traditional artistic methodologies. 1997.
This paper outlines the development over several years of Petit Mal, an autonomous robotic artwork, and discusses a new project arising from it. Central concerns are an holistic approach to the hardware/software duality, the construction of a seemingly sentient and social machine from minimal components, the generation of an agent interface utilising purely kinesthetic or somatosensory modes which `speak the language of the body' and bypasses textual,verbal or iconic signs. General goals are exploration of the `aesthetics of behavior', of the cultural dimensions of autonomous agents and of emergent sociality amongst agents, virtual and embodied. The research emerges from artistic practice and is therefore concerned with subtle and evocative modes of communication rather than pragmatic goal based functions. A notion of an ongoing conversation between system and user is desired over a (pavlovian) stimulus and response model. 1997.
Interactive art represents a radical phase-shift in western esthetics. Artists are confronting unexplored territory: the esthetics of machine mediated interactivity. Designing the interactive experience adds an entire dimension to the esthetic endevour, one without precedent in the visual and plastic arts. In the west, the visual arts have no tradition of an esthetics of interactivity. Six hundred years of painting has resulted in a rich esthetics of the still image, of color and line, shape and area, of representational geometry and perspective. The effect of six hundred years of enculturation is that we know how to read images (which observe the conventions of renaissance perspective) before we can read text. One hundred years of moving image has given us a culturally established set of cinematic conventions: we can read cinema. But as yet we have no culturally established esthtetic of real time interaction. 1996.
This paper is a consideration of the emerging discipline of Artificial Life, viewed from two perspectives. On the one hand, Artificial Life is considered from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. One the other, ALife is examined from the perspective of cultural practice, particularly from the perspective of an artist concerned with the implications of these ideas in the formation of an esthetic of interactivity. 1995.
The two impulses which I want to focus upon are the twin drives of mimesis and anthropmorphism. Although we consider mimesis and anthropomorphism to be concerns of the visual arts, I contend these drives cut through disciplines and find expression in the most advanced technology available at any particular historical moment. 1995.
In many discussions of computer arts, the conversation has focused upon a dialectic between the sciences and the arts, a recapitulation of C. P. Snow's somewhat dated dualism.[1] I want to insert a third term, without which such a discussion can have only limited relevance to contemporary culture: consumer commodity economics. 1995
Virtual Reality, like any other technology, is embedded in a cultural history which lends to the enterprise a worldview. In the first part of this paper I will attempt to unearth aspects of that system by, firstly, constructing a pre-history of VR; and secondly, examining VR's comtemporary cultural context. 1992-94.
ArtEngine is menu driven at the front end, but attempts a more complex interactivity. It requires the operator to create original lists of objects in the Scheme programming language. Thus it immediately engages the question of 'depth' of interactivity: how much learning should be required of the user before they can usefully interact, and the corollary: how rich can the harvest of this interaction be made to be. 1990