physical, autonomous machines

embodiment of intelligent systems

technological artefacts with their own agency

social robots living in the same environments with people

perceiving + acting → reasoning

migration of intelligence through different embodiments (virtual and physical platforms), with continuation of interaction between different bodies and sensors distributed through the environment; differences between robots joining humans in the physical world, and humans playing games in the computational worlds

HRI

Biological causes of behaviour

Robot should be anything but a human

How can a robotic creature live with humans? Social interest and contact, remembering and forgetting, supporting relationships and understanding social messaging, recognising and enacting expressions and emotions privacy issues

What should an “agent mind” look like?

Test: in games, where robot is a character playing a social game with you; learning from animation to design characters

more ecologically valid context

ethical dimension - how will people spend time with robots? tested in interaction design prototypes; challenging people’s assumptions about the world

animist perspective in robotics - ethics essential in robot development

robots share contextuality with humans and other intelligencies - when involved with humans, they are imbued with character and personality

→ machine wilderness

absolute & centralised control = impossibility

process = growth & decay

'what happens to life in our embodied actual when the object of our investigation becomes a virtual replicator?'

digital decay

rotting of protocols and routines

rheumatic interfaces with noise oozing out of them

demented search engines

exploring unpredictability of time leaps and system crashes, delays

digital sensuality (and the messy evolution of nn+mlf)

Sadie Plant - touching, distributed sampled fragments of lives and media tear the focus of singular vision apart

Vanishing point becomes an unstable topology

perception of realities increasingly blurry

worn out space punctured w/holes and openings

organic membranes shivering in data winds

biogenes & morphomemes

away from optimising, towards diversifying, evolving, becoming

topology of error

a forest of live wires

information is fragile ↔ noise as a source of new patterns

space between interfaces where digital art can function as a subversion of the polished make-believe future of the information era (well, shall we say we capitulate on this one - respectfully lay it to rest…)

code wriggles to the surface of the screen (→ live coding)

code stripped of functionality (→ machine wilderness)

we serve no content (jodi)

translation path does not exist

glitch = political anarchic; draws attention to the constructed nature of information

from useless UI shuffling (topographical amnesia) to deep drifting (derive)

virus in the corporate genome (an element of play and awareness of the market whose tools are colonising us)

is it broken or is it meant to sound like that?

glitch = discrepancy between intention and expectation

exploring spaces of non-lethal glitches - mutations, changes, corruptions

glitch as a catalyst of change and mutation - away from sedentary systems

epidemic interaction, fragmentation, functional paralysis, catastrophe - a need for a designing machines with an immune system to enable adaptation

different sites where glitches occur have dif. levels of fragility (data, protocol, system, intersystem…)

engineering errors: physical, bit level, input data, system, application, interaction…

to avoid collapse: loosen structure, make new connections, focus on emergence

for a sendentary system a glitch produces meaningless noise, in an emergent system the noise can become a new pattern. decay of one system can incite growth of another.

edge habitats - constant glitches - locally unstable, globally stable oscillations (e.g. tides), continous translations - space filling & clearing processes

robustness comes from withstanding interactions and resisting constraints - non-equilibrium dynamics incorporates glitches and mutates accordingly

distributed control. probabilistic co-evolution of divergent processes

able to heal & repair damage

media synaesthesia

graceful degradation

systems based on association & interconnection

computers and mnemonic machines supporting distributed collaboration between humans

content → context

author → context provider

media → actuators of interconnected events

creation → facilitation

emergence of tools that enable generative interconnection

unblocking information flows

breaking down hierarchical file-systems

away from systems that contain instead of communicate with media

an elastic system, extendable and scalable frameworks, learning, negotiating, remembering and forgetting

media transformed by the environment in which they are experienced

result = negotiation between internal rules of each element and external conditions of the environment

UI morphing to different users → tangible programming

interfaces as multidimensional mnemonic spaces

distributed people connected through digital tools

incompatible protocols, data & platforms

flakey networks

machine learning, tools that evolve with time and usage (thalience)

a glue layer between indeterminate components

a framework for developing frameworks

facilitating collaboration between networked participants

focus on what computers do well (crunching data) and enable people who are using the computer to do what they do well (whatever that might be)

ecstasy of communication at a distance

tubing between uncooperative sw, hw & people → promiscuous pipelines

using unreadable data meaningfully

design tools must be flexible to minimise constraints on the creative process

sculpting, kneading, weaving metaphors for interfaces

efficient algorithms for real time performance

digital materials with properties of elasticity, stiffness and fluidity

systems of self-organising elements from which shape and structure emerge