Here’s a great project that came out of the Adapative Architecture and Computation programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ by Marilena Skavara explores the functional possibilities and performative characteristics of cellular automata (CA). In addition to the unique emergent behaviour of CA, a neural network enables a further computational layer to evolve CA behaviour to the context of its surrounding environment.

Building upon the early work of Conway’s ‘Game of life’ and Stephen Wolfram’s extensive research on the wider implementation of CA, ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ becomes a living adapting skin, constantly training itself from the history of its own errors and achievements. For a more detailed description of the project, read Marilena’s article for Vague Terrain.

Another piece of work from the Emergence Exhibition “Propagations” by Leo Nunez is a system of cellular automatons, made up by 50 robots. Different states emerge from this complex system. These states are defined not only by the interaction of the robots with the spectators, but also by the interaction of the robots with their neighboring pairs. I’ve been looking into CA based physical environments for a while with a few of my students who’ve been building them at the Bartlett’s Adaptive Architecture & Computation course (Marilena Skavara & Kensuke Hotta) but Leo Nunez’s piece deals with the interaction of CA systems in such a wonderfully analog way which is rarely seen today.

This work system also tries to investigate the man machine relation. The robots are unmanageable objects; thus, the control of these escapes the individuals and remains in the system itself, in the propagation of the information between the objects. The interaction of the users is mediated by a luminous interface keeping the body of the user away from the robots. This distance emphasizes the notion of the unmanageable objects, establishing a man-machine relation only mediated and more and more distant.

Each automaton is molded into a small robotic sculpture. The shape is given by the different electronic components necessary for its functionality. All the robots share the same electronic circuit design, but in their formality they are all different. Each cell or robot is constructed with Low-tech technology. This decision seeks to create a speech that establishes itself in a context of social criticism, generating an argument on the difference in the technology availability between the countries of the first world and the Latin American countries.

Leo Nuñez studied Systems engineering and image and sound design. He is currently finishing a degree in Electronic Arts at the UNTREF (Tres de Febrero National University, Buenos Aires). He works as a professor at IUNA (National University Institute or Art) offering programming and Electronic Art Workshops.

“Robots build! At their program in architecture and digital production at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), the architects Gramazio and Kohler have installed a research facility that is unique in the world. It is based on a computer-controlled industrial robot that produces construction elements directly from design data. The robot works flexibly with a tremendous range of tools and materials.”

“With the help of algorithmic tools, we were able to manipulate the contours, dimensions, angles, and the sequence of openings, which could take any regular or irregular form.”

A bit of a ‘chicken or egg’ situation, I’m always interested to see how new techniques arise to make new design technically and economically feasible. Buying slaves to build your grand visions is so yesterday. Thanks robotics. I can’t imagine (nor hope) such techniques will ever replace human craftsmanship. They will (are) however opening some very interesting new doors.

Robot assistant? I want one.

http://www.gramaziokohler.com/
http://www.dfab.arch.ethz.ch/

In Fläsch, the winegrowers Martha and Daniel Gantenbein took advantage of the success of their Pinot Noir to replace their steel containers with oak barrels. They commissioned the architects Bearth & Deplazes with the design and construction of a new fermentation hall for twelve new containers. A wine-tasting lounge was to be located one floor above the hall.

The architects worked with Gramazio & Kohler on the facade, a double-skin of brick with polycarbonate panels on the interior. As they describe: “robotic production method … developed at the ETH Zurich enabled us to lay each one of the 20,000 bricks precisely according to programmed parameters—at the desired angle and at the exact prescribed intervals.”

Therefore a supergraphic composed of overlapped “grapes” could be created in brick in precast panels without the expense of numerous mock-ups or traditional masons. The wine estate in Fläsch follows the terroir principle. This principle states that the local colour – soil, microclimate, local traditions and the winegrower’s trademark – is directly reflected by the wine. A sensitive handling of space, temperature and light is therefore necessary. This was taken into account by the utilisation of special wall elements.

via Daily Dose

Korean artist, Choe U Ram, creates massive, precision engineered sculptures with an eerie organic feel. He uses cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life.

Exploring the boundaries of archeological discovery and developmental morphology, Choe’s explanations and Latin titles for these creations follow the linguistic traditions of scientific nomenclature.

Telling stories using gestural transformation and the tracing of imagined evolutionary stages, these pieces take on the silhouette of actual life forms, as intricate automata express a refined delicacy and weightlessness.

Unexpected and fantastical, Choe’s kinetic simulations cyclically breathe with movement that recalls aquatic propulsion, flight and ritualistic courtship displays.

Wall of Eyes by Adrian Baynes is an interactive public artwork, comprising of 225 mannequin eyes, which follow the viewer through space.

Its just one of the kinetic installations showing for the first time at Kinetica Art Fair opening today (Friday 27/02/09). More information to follow but if your about London this weekend, it looks worth a visit.

Here are a number videos of installations and sculptures on the theme of artificial life which won awards at VIDA last year. Via wmmna

Mission eternity sarcophagus

Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation).

The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.

ALAVS 2.0

Jed Berks’ Autonomous Light Air Vehicles combine many of the themes of artificial life and multi-agent robotics research in an accessible and elegant public presentation. These include capable powered navigation and obstacle avoidance, organized multi-agent behaviour (such as flocking), discernable (quasi) intelligent individual behaviour, and interaction with other (quasi) intelligent agents, i.e., people. Connecting these agendas with more contemporary interest in mobile and locative technologies, Berk has implemented human-ALAV communication via mobile phone technology. The rigors of such a project must not be elided.

While robots in research-lab contexts often exhibit remarkable capabilities, they are just as often delicate, unreliable and require the constant attention of one or several highly trained staff. A project like ALAVs must exhibit its qualities in the general public, must inform and entertain, and at the same time be robust and resilient to the unpredictabilities of unusual architectures and architectural materials, weather, children and crowds (and sometimes, animals) – influences which are almost always filtered out in the controlled environment of the lab.

The ALAVs achieve all this, while remaining lighter than air, an achievement in itself given the weight of batteries and other components. The ALAVs are beguilingly delicate translucent agents which drift and float in a most un-robotic way. Videos

Joseph Weizenbaum died at the ripe old age of 85 last month (NYTime Obituary). Weizenbaum was best known for ELIZA, a program designed in 1966 to establish natural language conversation with a computer by emulating a Rogerian therapist (Online Version of ELIZA). Weizenbaum was the first to note that the ELIZA conversations weren’t an example of computer “thinking,” but really consisted of some clever programming techniques. His argument that computers were merely tools to assist humans in their everyday lives put him in opposition to many of the leading researchers in the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

A few years after he wrote ELIZA, the idea of the thinking computer gained popular credence. A famous article in Life magazine in 1970 entitled “Meet Shakey, the First Electronic Person” was testament to this. Shakey was a Stanford University robot and one of Weizenbaum’s colleagues at MIT was quoted in the Life article as saying: “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with general intelligence of an average human being.”

Shakey the Robot was the first mobile robot to be able to reason to some degree about its own actions.

Soon, the popular media was trumpeting the impending arrival of thinking machines and it was left largely to Weizenbaum to put the issue in perspective and to note that computers as thinking machines weren’t right around the corner. He drew more fire from the AI community from his book, “Computer Power and Human Reason” that argued in part that man from the view of information processing is looked at as a means and not as an end. He worried that many computer scientists were following paths that were dehumanizing. Weizenbaum argued, essentially, that computers impose a mechanistic point of view on their users on us and that that perspective can all too easily crowd out other, possibly more human, perspectives.

Weizenbaum considered himself a gadfly and even heretic of the artificial intelligence community, which has had soaring flights and deep drops in acceptance and interest since he wrote ELIZA in the mid-1960s. AI currently is in a down draft as the firms that were built around it in the 1980s have largely faded from view. In 2007, Il Mare Film created an 80-minute documentary entitled “Weizenbaum. Rebel At Work.” Trailer The film is a personal portrait of the man and his life, with him telling mainly stories. Originally produced in German, an American version is available with subtitles and voice-over. The site also has a photo gallery of Weizenbaum’s life supported by audio clips from the film.

more articles on Joseph EDGE, Technium, MIT

The Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles. via spatialrobot

Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve. via the very interesting spatialrobots