Unconventional Self

Charl Linssen / Werner van der Zwan

Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / April 17 – June 9 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.

Unconventional Self (2023)

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a chair? Now is your chance to find out! By combining their expertise in telepresence and furniture robots, the artists tried to answer this question in this exploratory experience. By animating found objects with electronics, it is now possible to see and move through the world as a chair.

Telepresence robotics allow a person to embody a remote robotic avatar. The person observes the environment from the robot’s perspective, which can move around under remote control. The remotely operated body mediates the relationship with the world. If the experience is sufficiently compelling, a perspective shift occurs, where the person controlling the robot feels like the robot’s body is their body, and they are perceiving and acting in the world from the robot’s point-of-view: they feel “embodied” in the sculpture.

In our version of the telepresence robot, one embodies a folding chair. Participants develop a sense of this new body, discovering new possibilities, vulnerabilities, and desires. Like the beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the human characters slowly start to become their new bodies and experience being part of the same private world as the inhuman characters around them. This project was co-produced by V2_ Lab for Unstable Media. The choreographic text was written in collaboration with Marta Wörmer.

Werner van der Zwan (NL) is a Dutch artist living and working in Rotterdam. In his artistic practice, he investigates how a sense of life can be created in the non-living. By animating found objects and giving them a lifeworld, he tries to question the dichotomy between subject and object. He does this by morphing the objects into moving bodies using electromotors. In performances and installations, stray objects are given a last breath, expressing their distinct character. 

ververwant.nl

Charl Linssen (NL) is particularly interested in computer simulation of dynamical processes, which unfold over time. The brain is such a dynamic system and is moreover involved in continuous feedback with its environment, mediated by the body through perception and action. In his spare time, Charl uses electronics and robotics to build objects that exhibit a similar kind of responsiveness to their environment. These objects have a quality of “animatedness,” or being endowed with a spirit, in the sense that they are not just objects like any other but come to life once the circuit is powered on.

itfromb.it

Header Graphics: “A Bestiary of the Anthropocene” by disnovation.org.

Hotspot

Marlot Meyer

Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / April 17 – June 9 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.

Hotspot  (2023)

Hotspot is a shared experience of uploading yourself in order to reconnect to yourself and each other inside a sentient, listening space. It is an experience of letting go of control in exchange for connection and communication. By listening through internal biosignals and expressing through electricity and air, Hotspot exposes our insides to the outside, and in doing so, brings the outside inside through a situated extra-sensory perception that moves beyond individuality and logic. 

How we perceive, understand, and interact with our world is becoming increasingly detached from our physical and tangible reality. We prioritize thinking over feeling and data over knowledge. As humanity’s primary activity becomes the crossing through screens, it becomes clear that the self can exist in more than one place or in more than one body at a time. We increasingly try to relate to ourselves, each other, and our environments through virtual images, data, social media posts, shared photos and videos, and documentaries. This is also the predominant way to engage with information about the world or communicate with each other. 

The distinction between knowledge and data is blurring. The problem with data is that it is abstracted and detached from the reality it represents. Data, by default, can only represent the things that are quantifiable. It breaks a complex system of connected things into isolated parts. For us, it creates a fixation with numbers, values and graphs in order to give us meaning. But by doing this we lose touch with our intuitive knowledge making processes. 

As our identities and values become increasingly entangled with data extraction, representation and creation, we feel we are changing from subject to object, and fear exposing or sharing ourselves to unwanted eyes, demanding privacy and anonymity. 

What if instead of separating the physical and virtual, mind and body, and self and other, we were able to directly sense and experience how one intimately and inescapably involves the other? That the inside and the outside are the same thing, and are continuously creating the other. 

Entering a jungle of synthetic vines, you join a circle of bodies wearing yellow octopuses on their heads; nobody is talking, yet you have the feeling that they are all making contact with each other. 

These little creatures have sensors on their tentacles that they like to wrap around the heads of visitors. Once connected, the sensors collect and upload the biodata of their wearers. But instead of extracting and uploading this data into a cloud or cryptic code, the wearer’s biodata is directly translated into the physical space and sensations of bodies around them. 

Once connected to the “Hotspot,” your body becomes a channel in a web of information exchange: your heart rate, sweat response, prefrontal cortex activity, and eye movement reflect how you are feeling and responding to the world around you. Although you cannot actively control these aspects of your body, you feel like a part of you is being uploaded and downloaded in other places. You hear the hissing and puffing of silicone vines as they gyrate around you, spouting gusts of air that tickle your hair and ruffle your clothes. 

Electrical pulses are sent to your body—tickling, tapping, shocking; you feel a change in temperature. This is the translation made by a computer of the other wearer’s biodata into sensations that influence your own body. Experiencing how others—both human and machine–manipulate what you feel and think can raise doubts about who is in control and who is being controlled. Although this fear quickly dissipates, as you know, they are feeling your biodata on their body. You are mutually exchanging. 

Marlot Meyer (ZA/NL) is an Inter (Active | Net) – Multi (Media | Disciplinary) – Artist whose inspiration and energy stems from her majority analog experiences growing up in South Africa and the contrast between this and the mediated world we live and communicate in and through today.

She uses technology as a tool to infiltrate, examine, and reconstruct the embedded knowledge that lies within our bodies and the cultures, structures, and meanings we have created around them. In doing so she breaks down barriers and binaries and overcomes the problematic notions of separation between the self and other. 

Her playful attitude towards technology acts as the driving force to understand and work with digital media, seeing it as a tool to illustrate the already existing, often unseen natural forces and connections around us.

Her work aims to create experiences that picture the body with boundaries extending outside and beyond the skin into a much vaster network of senses, signals, and sources, whereby a new definition of self, body, and space can be created and shared.

marlotmeyer.com
Header Graphics: “Hotspot”  (detail), courtesy of the artist.

PL’AI

Špela Petrič

Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / April 17 – June 9 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.

PL’AI  (2020)

“PL’AI” is an AI robot created to play with cucumber plants. Recognizing that crops are surveilled and controlled by algorithms as much as people, the project examines the potential of using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics to relate to plants in a non-extractive manner; to resist the reductive view of plants as a living resource and use technology towards their joy—whatever it may be. 

Špela Petrič sets out to question whether AI and machine learning tools, their high-tech sensorium, and bespoke effectors are, in fact, inescapably tied to utility and efficiency. Can we make an AI-powered robot whose purpose is to play with plants? And how do plants play anyway?

In contrast to a game with set rules, play evades clear definitions—play is relational, its bounds malleable, and its intensity in flux. It is through play that living beings learn about what their bodies can do, exploring with curiosity the freedom of agency prior to confronting existential challenges. And yet, what constitutes play also lies in the eyes of the beholder. Because it is so loosely defined and because the pleasure it brings to the entity playing is a first-person experience, it barely passes scientific scrutiny. Within the scientific episteme, ascribing vegetables with the potential of play would likely be considered an anthropomorphization that should be avoided. Since AI genealogically stems from technoscience based on objective knowledge, an AI robot built by people explicitly for the joy of beings as ontologically unrelated as plants are to humans poses a paradox. To add to the conundrum, Petrič considers the AI robot as a human prosthesis that augments some of the perceptual shortcomings of the human body that make it difficult to play with plants. The robot can both kinetically and cognitively enter plant time in a way we cannot.

With the expertise of people from the fields of computer and cognitive science, biology, engineering, design, art, and philosophy, the project attempts to make a morphologically and computationally plant-centered robot. The robot holds a planter with soil, above which 36 colorful bouncy balls are suspended from individually controlled wires. These are the effectors which the robot unwinds slowly to approach and play with the plants. Once the cucumbers start growing mature leaves, thin tendrils develop opposite each one. The tendrils are very motile, exploring their environment in a swaying motion, sensing touch, light, and perhaps even scents. If they come across a suitable object or surface (in this case, the robot’s wire) they wrap around it tightly and pull on it with a helical coiling mechanism.

While the visitor might not see play unfolding with their own eyes, they can catch a glimpse of it on the computer screen, which continuously replays the last 24 hours of interaction as a time-lapse video and reports on the latest steps taken by the AI robot. 

As the cucumbers grow and envelop the robot, both become imprinted by the choices the other made in the process. Play as a moment in time seamlessly transitions into utility, the robot AI transforming into a trellis that allows the cucumber plants to stretch, flower, and fruit, eventually producing delicious cucumbers to be consumed by vegetable lovers. But by playing with machines in this manner, we become a little less deterministic, a little more plant-like, a little stranger, and a little less estranged from our digital spawn.

Credits
Programming: Benjamin Fele, Tim Oblak | Robot development & assembly: Gregor Krpič, Erik Krkač, Jože Zajc, David Pilipovič | Hands-on assistance: Meta Petrič, Bor Jarh | Consulting: Adriana Knouf | Text: Agnieszka Wolodzko | Narration: Blaž Šef | Design: Miha Turšič | Photo & video: Hana Jošić | Thanks to: Andrej Petrič, Zoran Srdić-Janežič, Waag, MU Hybrid Art House | Produced by: Kersnikova Institute / Kapelica Gallery within the framework of the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab | Further development of the project: Smart Hybrid Forms | Co-funded by: Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture, Creative Industries Fund NL

Špela Petrič (SI) is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic work combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives.

Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).

spelapetrič.org
Header Graphics: “PL´AI”, photo Hana Josič / Portait photo: Anze Sekelj.