Eve of Dust

Eve of Dust

Eve of Dust is a collaborative performance and installation between a human and a robot. The artwork draws on both the possibilities and anxieties arising from the collaboration between humans and emerging intelligent systems personified in the robot.

Partners

Australia Council for the Arts

Investigators

John McCormick
Adam Nash (RMIT)
Steph Hutchison (QUT)

Eve of Dust is a collaborative performance and installation between a human and a robot. The artwork draws on both the possibilities and anxieties arising from the collaboration between humans and emerging intelligent systems personified in the robot. The artwork uses a Sawyer collaborative robot, an articulated 7-jointed robot arm that somewhat resembles a snake. The performance investigates the co-creative possibilites offered by collboration with non-human systems.

The work has two modes: performance mode and interactive mode. Performance mode is a collaborative duet between the robot and a professional dancer. Using a handheld VR controller to pick out points in space, the dancer is able to choreograph the robot’s movement in real time, in collaboration with the robot. The robot’s movements generate music in real time, with the rotation, position and motion of the robot determining pitch, rhythm, timbre etc. In this way, the dancer responds to and collaborates in both the robot’s movements and the generated music, creating a collaborative dance duet that is unique every performance.

In interactive mode, members of the public can play with the robot using a handheld VR controller to choreograph the robot’s movements which, as in performance mode, generates music in realtime. Inviting a playful interaction, people can collaborate with the robot to make a real time robot music and dance performance. People can respond to the robot movement and indeed will find it hard to remain passive in the unfolding duet that is unique to each person. Performed as part of Siggraph Asia 2018 at the Tokyo International Forum Japan. More information available at: http://www.wildsystem.net/eve_of_dust.html

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City of Androids

City of Androids

A child robot uses an artificial neural network and location data to recognise where it is and what it is seeing within the Melbourne CBD. Participants can wheel the child around and it will recite stories it creates based on its surrounds. Emerging intelligent systems are increasingly impactful on our lives. The research investigates shared creativity and empathy with non-human systems. 

Partners

City of Melbourne – Arts Grants

Investigators

John McCormick

Adam Nash (RMIT)

A child robot uses anartificial neural network and location data to recognise where it is and what it is seeing within the Melbourne CBD. Participants can wheel the child around and it will recite stories it creates based on its surrounds. Emerging intelligent systems are increasingly impactful on our lives. The research investigates shared creativity and empathy with non-human systems.

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Child in the Wild (ROBOTS + AI)

Child in the Wild (ROBOTS + AI)

Presentation of the Child in the Wild exhibition at the Art Science Museum Singapore, Black Box RMIT and the Horsham Town Hall Gallery.

Partners

Australia Council for the Arts

Investigators

John McCormick
Adam Nash  (RMIT University)

Child in the Wild is a work by Wild System (aka Adam Nash and John McCormick), see the work’s official website at wildsystem.net. Child in the Wild is an interactive installation that enables human participants and a child robot to co-create an immersive audiovisual artwork through the use of the robot’s artificial neural networks to enable object and image recognition. The resulting artwork dissolves the boundaries between computational and physical phenomena, dispalying an aesthetic that is a real hybrid of the physical and the digital, of human and machine learning, of natural and artificial intelligence, and of real and synthetic evolution.

It is an artwork and aesthetic that emerges from the interaction between robot, people and virtual environment, neither one taking precedence, rather collaborating on a genuinely post-digital, post-convergent artwork. Child in the Wild has been presented at SIGGRAPH Asia Art Track, Macau, China in November 2016; Singapore ArtScience Museum, ACM Creativity and Cognition Art Track Microbytes of Innovation in July 2017; Data Is Nothing at RMIT Black Box Gallery in Marck 2018.

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