Abstract
Performing with prosthetic attachments and robotic extensions, the artist’s body becomes an operational system that combines improvised actions with involuntary and automated motions. The body interfaced and interacting with machines, experiences its own movements as machinic. Using anecdotes, insights and references to my own practice, as well as to recent developments in robotics for medical, industrial and military uses, there is a discussion of the issues and ethics of human-robot interaction. Notions of aliveness, embodiment and agency become problematic. The hybridization of robotics and art generates contestable futures of form, function and aesthetics. Possibilities that can be actualized, interrogated, evaluated and possibly appropriated. Alternate anatomical architectures are engineered, experienced and interrogated.
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A Webcrawler is a program, a type of search engine, that automatically searches and indexes internet information using keywords, links and other data.
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A Chatbot is a rudimentary AI that can converse with people or with itself either in text or in spoken language.
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Kroker, Arthur. 2012 Body Drift: Butler Hayles Harraway Minneapolis University of Minnesota.
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See the work of Kevin Warwick on robots with bio-brains, Reading University, UK.
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First proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s that indicated a significant dip in the graph he plotted at the point where the robot most resembled a human.
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A capability displayed by guide dogs and incorporated into Japanese roboticist Sasumu Tachi’s “Tele-Existence” system.
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The Hexapod prototype and the MUSCLE MACHINE project was jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Board in collaboration with The Nottingham Trent University and The Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group, COGS, The University of Sussex. The project was coordinated by Prof. Barry Smith (DRU, TNTU). Engineering of the robot by Dr. Philip Breedon (FaCCT, TNTU). The first demonstration and presentation of the project was at Byron House, The Nottingham Trent University, 26 June 2003. The first performances were done at Gallery 291, London, 1 July, 2003.
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Engineering and software programming by f18, Hamburg.
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Demonstrations to show the dexterity possible have included miniature paintings and folding miniature origami and paper planes.
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The Stomach Sculpture was realized with the assistance of Jason Patterson, Rainer Linz and Nathan Thompson.
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The Microbot animation was done by Steve Middleton.
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See the work of Sukho Park, Kyoungrae and Jongho Park, School of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Chonnam National University, Korea http://robotics.tch.harvard.edu/workshops/iros2012/resources/park2010development.pdf.
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Project team at the MARCS Lab, University of Western Sydney, included Damith Herath, Christian Kroos and Zhengzhi Zhang.
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The attention model was developed by Christian Kroos.
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Developed at the MARCS Lab, University of Western Sydney, by Damith Herath, Christian Kroos and Zhengzhi Zhang.
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See “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us about the History of Life and the Future of Technology”. John Long, New York: Basic Books, 2012.
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William Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute in Houston.
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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
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Stelarc (2016). Encounters, Anecdotes and Insights—Prosthetics, Robotics and Art. In: Herath, D., Kroos, C., Stelarc (eds) Robots and Art. Cognitive Science and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0321-9_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0321-9_21
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