[Music]
[Applause]
why what seriously why why do we do this
okay quick little TED survey raise your
hands if you have caught yourself doing
this in the last week yeah be honest I
thought so now how many of you have
actually managed to switch this thing
off including the little one that we’ve
all got in our pockets for a week
sometime in the last year not so many
all right now how many of you feel like
nature is something that you wish you
had more of in your life my name is
David McGowan and for the last six years
I’ve been leading a rather unusual
experiment right here in Bristol
codenamed rusty
squid rusty squid at the heart of our
little laboratory is a team of artists
engineers and designers who have come
together to explore the potential of
hijacking and repurposing robotic
technology has a fundamental form of
human expression rather than just a tool
we use electronics and motors sensors
and control systems and elements of
artificial intelligence as our creative
medium our pallet we’re known for some
of our more public works of robotic art
and designs such as book life
here we used traditional wooden
mechanisms alongside contemporary
robotics and electronics and motors and
combined it with swarm algorithms to
bring 400 books to life right here in
Bristol Central Library when you entered
the hive the enormous wooden hive
sensors would capture your movements in
the space and the books would respond
they would ripple like a flock of birds
or swarm like Angry bees
some of our projects are small and
intimate like our recent project heart
in your hands here we worked alongside
leading biomedical engineers from King’s
College London and we developed these
unique actuators that could move like
heart muscle and we designed and we
fabricated these soft robotic hearts
when you held them in your hand they
could sense your heart rate and they
would beat in time with what exactly
what was going on inside your chest so
you could literally have this experience
of what it’s like to hold your own heart
a father could hold his his daughter’s
heart beating friends could exchange
their hearts and a couple could even try
this to see if there was any effect
we we seem to have hit a nerve because
you see the the the physical and
embodied nature of robotics as long with
this ability to sense and respond to the
world around it is an incredibly
effective way at engaging people so our
little team has been growing and right
now we’re kind of victims of our own
success as sometimes it feels like we’re
witnessing what might be the birth of an
entirely new creative industry one that
might possibly define our century but
I’m not here to talk about our projects
nor do I want to talk about this
industry’s potential I’d like to share
with you our underlying motivation
that’s what drives us from day to day
you see it’s the cultural and social
impact that we’ve been witnessing that
we think might even be critical to our
very survival this century it’s it’s an
ambitious goal so perhaps is best
understood through a series of little
stories so if you’re alright with it I’d
like to take you guys on a bit of a
personal journey how’s that sound
yeah you ready okay story starts here at
an anti-imf riot in Prague it was the
end of the 90s and I was part of a
movement it was a radicalized
politically active movement which meant
at that time that I was rioting you see
we we were in our 20s and we were quite
angry we were angry at society’s
impotence to respond to all the
environmental devastation we saw we were
angry at globalization eroding local
cultures we were angry at this very
warped sense of economic value and
growth that seemed to have very very
little to do with human wellbeing one
time we built this enormous globe it was
about four meters across and we
decorated it to look like the earth we
thought we were being very clever
because we were gonna roll it down the
hill and burst through the riot police
lines and break into the convention
centre and have a voice
hurt I guess but of course the police
were a few steps ahead of us and they
met us at the top of a hill and so we
had to roll the thing up and you can see
them they’re blowing the lovely earth to
pieces with their water cannon it it
might seem a bit naive and romantic but
we were very very serious because we
thought that there was a war going on a
war between nature humanity and
technology technology to us was this
unnatural force that had invaded us and
we needed to resist it before we became
enslaved to it and humanity well we saw
humanity like a cancer that was growing
out of control that needed to be
contained a nature this was the
interesting one nature was our moral
compass balance diversity sustainability
something pure that needed to be
protected at all costs and even
worshipped we wouldn’t have admitted
then but nature in a way had become our
deity when I wasn’t rioting I was
working on organic farms because the
solution as this not so small community
viewed it was to go back to the land the
Garden of Eden return to the primitive
does anyone recognize this face yes it’s
it’s a very interesting and important
story to me and I think it’ll help you
understand where I’m coming from
in 1978 somebody started sending mail
bombs all around the United States
targeting universities computer science
labs professors of artificial
intelligence and robotics his name was
Ted Kaczynski and he’s responsible for
killing three people and brutally
maiming more than 20 it was very serious
that he was a child prodigy and the age
of 25 was a professor of mathematics at
UC Berkeley he fled civilization to
become a hermit and through the 70s 80s
and 90s from a small
in the woods he unleashed his terror he
was finally caught because of what he
wrote a 35,000 word anti-technology
treatise called the industrial society
and its future
it became known as the Unabomber
manifesto and though we all abhorred his
acts of terror his words had got under
our skin you see what he wrote was
incredibly prophetic he spoke about how
we are forced to adopt industrial
technologies or we risk complete
exclusion from society he described it
as a form of technological enslavement
that threatened to erode our very fabric
of humanity he said that one day power
and wealth will be extremely
concentrated because of this and he even
said that one day computers would even
be entering our brains crazy right
so then something very interesting
happened to me my mother was undergoing
double knee replacement surgery so I
left my rioting buddies for a while and
I flew back to to Canada to spend time
with her as she was recovering from
hospital and when I was there in
hospital one day she turned to me and
she said David I was like yeah she said
I’m thinking of becoming a cyborg I was
like what you see she had Parkinson’s
Parkinson’s disease and the disease was
progressing and about that time a new
therapy had just been approved for deep
brain stimulation literally a chip in
the brain Farah was sitting on the
hospital bed with her and she was
showing me these these films of new
patients that had just received this
therapy I don’t know if anybody have
seen it but it’s incredible literally
you see the shaking from the from the
Parkinson’s and at the flick of a switch
on a remote control the chip in the
brain is switched on and the shaking
stops just like that it wasn’t the fact
that she had titanium knees and was
considering to become
neurological cyborg it was everything it
was it was the anesthetics in her body
protecting her from the pain it was the
the computer and the World Wide Web and
the digital video and the very flight I
took to get there I was struck with a
seismic philosophical shake up how had I
come to have such hostility to
technology in society how had I ended up
here well obviously I wasn’t always that
way I’m gonna need to take you back a
little further to when I was 7 I had
seen this film called the children of
theater Street it was 1977 at the height
of the Soviet ballet the film followed
children as they trained for the the
Russian Kirov ballet in Leningrad and I
thought it was the coolest thing I had
ever seen and when I came home I said
dad I know what I want to be a ballet
dancer I ignored his rather confused and
concerned look and trained classically
for 10 years I was interested in
anything that moved
I built puppets and put on puppet shows
I even hacked my old Walkmans in the 80s
and turned them into little little
analog robots that was scurry around the
floor I wasn’t just trying to get a
reaction out of people I wanted to move
people I was fascinated by the power
motion had to trigger emotion there was
no distinction between art and science
or design or engineering or even
philosophy at that age I mean perhaps
were all born natural polymaths
but there are no polymath pathways to
take in our world I had to decide so I
ended up going into the performing arts
I was accepted to the National Theatre
School of Canada where I discovered and
fell in love with the more physical
types of theater theater such as
commedia dell’arte a type of street
theatre popular in the 16th and 17th
century Europe these guys these troops
would literally perform on the back of
an upturned cart in a crazy marketplace
competing with you know a local hanging
over there and a pig being slaughtered
over there
so this bold physicality was required in
order to attract and hold the attention
of the public
in contrast I’d look around in today’s
world and it seemed like we were almost
completely oblivious to the fact that we
had a body technology and society seemed
to be driven by this out of body
identity constipated with cognition
that’s why I rejected technological
society in search of our more wild
nature and I slipped into radicalism I
left dance and theater as well with one
exception puppetry I would build these
little naked puppets and I would perform
with them on the streets all over the
world I would sometimes sit them on the
edge of a garbage can and they would
quietly move I’d have a little puppet
rummage through the garbage and pull out
I don’t know something better packaging
and hand it to somebody watching and
then cheekily
the pub would put out his hand and ask
for a payment in return so for about 10
years I made my living this way
traveling the world and and selling
garbage to people so there I was there I
was working on organic farms performing
on the streets with my little puppets
and selling garbage to people and
rioting having a philosophical crisis
about my cyborg mother I didn’t know
what to do
so I went back to the Unabomber
manifesto and started reading and I
became very curious about his targets
leaders in the field of computer science
robotics and artificial intelligence who
were they I was so surprised by what I
found the very first to build a fully
autonomous electronic robot was William
grey Walter from Bristol he was using
vacuum tubes and relays and he built
these little cybernetic life forms that
looked like tortoises he was
demonstrating how complex and rich
behavior can emerge from very simple
physical elements
I discovered rodney brooks who in the
80s was exploring embodied intelligence
in machines see micro computers were far
too slow back then to be of much use so
he was forced to build robots that had
these decentralized nervous systems made
up of simple little reflexes and then
there was his PhD student cynthia brazil
who was researching social and emotional
intelligence in machines i was totally
stunned these researchers and scientists
saw this world in much the same way as I
did
emergent embodied emotional and it
reminded me of my little analog Walkman
insects I used to build as a kid and
that that philosophical curiosity I had
back then was reawakened so I came to
Bristol to study robotics but I was not
prepared for the culture shock that I
was in for this was not an exaggeration
Chris packages and pop cans piled as
high as they could go the guys that I
was studying robotics with I mean I love
them all but well they were almost all
guys obsessed with logic we bid
disembodied with questionable social and
emotional skills
you see they were they were amazing at
programming and building robots because
that is all they did they were practiced
at it they were less practiced at the
social and emotional stuff these guys
had never seen a live dance performance
in their entire life let alone ever
socially danced so no wonder this is
where we are today our machines are
created in our engineers image we have
these tools that are that are logic
tools that are disembodied I have poor
social and emotional skills but it’s not
just the engineers and scientists there
to blame for this state of affairs the
artists have just as much to answer for
when I finished studying robotics I set
up a technology lab in our local art
college this was a place where students
from the creative industry could come
and learn some basic engineering skills
when most of the art students and even
many of the staff would enter the space
there would be this sharp hiss in
through the teeth and the shoulders
would go up around their ears it was
like an allergic reaction to engineering
one student came in she said you know I
don’t do technology I’m an artist I said
oh well what do you do and she said oh I
do ceramics I said okay well walk me
through what you do as a ceramicist and
she proceeded to tell me about the
material properties of the clay about
the chemistry of the glazes about the
specifics of the kilns and the
temperatures required she was speaking
without a doubt as an engineer and a
scientist so how is this come to be how
would how come engineers arts and
scientists or see themselves are so
different why did we ever do this in the
first place why did we ever walk into a
que with a mouthful of paint and blow a
hand stencil on the wall is it not to
say I am or to say we are perhaps we
can’t help but create representations of
ourself in the world around us from
carving
little figures to the puppets found in
archeological digs all over the world to
the amazing clockwork automata of the
Renaissance to the soft toys we’ve all
loved as children to robots
we have been breathing life into the
inanimate to reflect back on ourselves
and make sense of what on earth is going
on for a very very long time sometimes I
think that many of the robotic engineers
in the labs around the world are just
artists in denial you see there was
nothing radical that our little protest
group was doing in the 90s when we
rejected technology and glorified nature
we were simply regurgitating and
reinforcing age-old identities
there wasn’t a war going on between
nature humanity and technology there
couldn’t be they’re all the same thing
technology wasn’t robbing us of our wild
nature as Ted Kaczynski wrote it is our
wild nature we are so intimately bound
with it and society didn’t need to be
torn down as I once believed it’s the
it’s the walls that society has created
between art and engineering and science
and design that need to be torn down and
that is exactly why we set up this
little laboratory rusty squid we are
creating experiences that can awaken the
human animal and at the same time remind
us of our internet bond with technology
but we have a we have a wee bit of a
problem you see the same identities that
we are trying to challenge out in the
world are getting in the way of our very
own artists and engineers and designers
working effectively together we’ve now
realized that if we want to create a
fundamentally new cultural experience we
need to start working in a fundamentally
different way so we’ve had to go back to
first principles and create
fundamentally new tools I’d like to
share two of those with you before I
leave today
the first one we call story machine
this is basically a non-linear
storyboard for behavior and relationship
design of complex robotic systems our
entire team can come together and they
can share their diverse and specific
understanding of a project with each
other because the relationship between
software mechanics and motion behavior
aesthetics is all equally represented
this tool we call the Rigler for obvious
reasons it’s basically a recording
studio and mixing desk for movement
rather than sound a puppeteer or an
engineer on any any of us can grab the
joysticks and quickly bring a prototype
to life the movement is all recorded and
laid down in tracks and these tracks can
then be edited and tuned and altered and
most importantly is then turned into
kinematic software that then can drive
our robotic creations
so we’ve only just scratched the surface
of these tools and we don’t expect to
solve this in our lifetime we we suspect
that this thing is generational so for
that we’ve started an internship and
each year we invite a young artist a
young engineer and a young designer to
form an ensemble and work alongside our
core team so they can experience what it
is like to have an integrated working
practice and a few years ago we bought
an old derelict building and we’re in
the final stages of building regulations
in the hope to build what we think might
be the first UK or even the world’s
first robotic art and design studio I am
concerned that our civilization is not
prepared for this century if even a
fraction of the technological tsunami
that we are expecting hits us and we are
in for a rough ride and I fear that we
will react badly to the many shocks that
this century could hold it would be very
easy for many of us to slip into that
fierce hostility towards technological
society as I once did and many people I
know did last winter I invited our core
team to each bring their most beloved
childhood toy can you tell which one is
the engineer which one’s the designer
which one’s the illustrator which one’s
the programmer we can’t we’ve just got
far too much in common I suspect that
our only hope for surviving this century
is that we admit that the boundaries
between nature humanity and technology
are only in our mind we need to learn to
see the intimate relationship between
them and we have to challenge this
culture that continues to perpetuate the
divisions between art and engineering
and science and design so that we can
face this uncertain future with an
honest and integrated embrace thank you
very much
[Music]
you
[Applause]
why what seriously why why do we do this
okay quick little TED survey raise your
hands if you have caught yourself doing
this in the last week yeah be honest I
thought so now how many of you have
actually managed to switch this thing
off including the little one that we’ve
all got in our pockets for a week
sometime in the last year not so many
all right now how many of you feel like
nature is something that you wish you
had more of in your life my name is
David McGowan and for the last six years
I’ve been leading a rather unusual
experiment right here in Bristol
codenamed rusty
squid rusty squid at the heart of our
little laboratory is a team of artists
engineers and designers who have come
together to explore the potential of
hijacking and repurposing robotic
technology has a fundamental form of
human expression rather than just a tool
we use electronics and motors sensors
and control systems and elements of
artificial intelligence as our creative
medium our pallet we’re known for some
of our more public works of robotic art
and designs such as book life
here we used traditional wooden
mechanisms alongside contemporary
robotics and electronics and motors and
combined it with swarm algorithms to
bring 400 books to life right here in
Bristol Central Library when you entered
the hive the enormous wooden hive
sensors would capture your movements in
the space and the books would respond
they would ripple like a flock of birds
or swarm like Angry bees
some of our projects are small and
intimate like our recent project heart
in your hands here we worked alongside
leading biomedical engineers from King’s
College London and we developed these
unique actuators that could move like
heart muscle and we designed and we
fabricated these soft robotic hearts
when you held them in your hand they
could sense your heart rate and they
would beat in time with what exactly
what was going on inside your chest so
you could literally have this experience
of what it’s like to hold your own heart
a father could hold his his daughter’s
heart beating friends could exchange
their hearts and a couple could even try
this to see if there was any effect
we we seem to have hit a nerve because
you see the the the physical and
embodied nature of robotics as long with
this ability to sense and respond to the
world around it is an incredibly
effective way at engaging people so our
little team has been growing and right
now we’re kind of victims of our own
success as sometimes it feels like we’re
witnessing what might be the birth of an
entirely new creative industry one that
might possibly define our century but
I’m not here to talk about our projects
nor do I want to talk about this
industry’s potential I’d like to share
with you our underlying motivation
that’s what drives us from day to day
you see it’s the cultural and social
impact that we’ve been witnessing that
we think might even be critical to our
very survival this century it’s it’s an
ambitious goal so perhaps is best
understood through a series of little
stories so if you’re alright with it I’d
like to take you guys on a bit of a
personal journey how’s that sound
yeah you ready okay story starts here at
an anti-imf riot in Prague it was the
end of the 90s and I was part of a
movement it was a radicalized
politically active movement which meant
at that time that I was rioting you see
we we were in our 20s and we were quite
angry we were angry at society’s
impotence to respond to all the
environmental devastation we saw we were
angry at globalization eroding local
cultures we were angry at this very
warped sense of economic value and
growth that seemed to have very very
little to do with human wellbeing one
time we built this enormous globe it was
about four meters across and we
decorated it to look like the earth we
thought we were being very clever
because we were gonna roll it down the
hill and burst through the riot police
lines and break into the convention
centre and have a voice
hurt I guess but of course the police
were a few steps ahead of us and they
met us at the top of a hill and so we
had to roll the thing up and you can see
them they’re blowing the lovely earth to
pieces with their water cannon it it
might seem a bit naive and romantic but
we were very very serious because we
thought that there was a war going on a
war between nature humanity and
technology technology to us was this
unnatural force that had invaded us and
we needed to resist it before we became
enslaved to it and humanity well we saw
humanity like a cancer that was growing
out of control that needed to be
contained a nature this was the
interesting one nature was our moral
compass balance diversity sustainability
something pure that needed to be
protected at all costs and even
worshipped we wouldn’t have admitted
then but nature in a way had become our
deity when I wasn’t rioting I was
working on organic farms because the
solution as this not so small community
viewed it was to go back to the land the
Garden of Eden return to the primitive
does anyone recognize this face yes it’s
it’s a very interesting and important
story to me and I think it’ll help you
understand where I’m coming from
in 1978 somebody started sending mail
bombs all around the United States
targeting universities computer science
labs professors of artificial
intelligence and robotics his name was
Ted Kaczynski and he’s responsible for
killing three people and brutally
maiming more than 20 it was very serious
that he was a child prodigy and the age
of 25 was a professor of mathematics at
UC Berkeley he fled civilization to
become a hermit and through the 70s 80s
and 90s from a small
in the woods he unleashed his terror he
was finally caught because of what he
wrote a 35,000 word anti-technology
treatise called the industrial society
and its future
it became known as the Unabomber
manifesto and though we all abhorred his
acts of terror his words had got under
our skin you see what he wrote was
incredibly prophetic he spoke about how
we are forced to adopt industrial
technologies or we risk complete
exclusion from society he described it
as a form of technological enslavement
that threatened to erode our very fabric
of humanity he said that one day power
and wealth will be extremely
concentrated because of this and he even
said that one day computers would even
be entering our brains crazy right
so then something very interesting
happened to me my mother was undergoing
double knee replacement surgery so I
left my rioting buddies for a while and
I flew back to to Canada to spend time
with her as she was recovering from
hospital and when I was there in
hospital one day she turned to me and
she said David I was like yeah she said
I’m thinking of becoming a cyborg I was
like what you see she had Parkinson’s
Parkinson’s disease and the disease was
progressing and about that time a new
therapy had just been approved for deep
brain stimulation literally a chip in
the brain Farah was sitting on the
hospital bed with her and she was
showing me these these films of new
patients that had just received this
therapy I don’t know if anybody have
seen it but it’s incredible literally
you see the shaking from the from the
Parkinson’s and at the flick of a switch
on a remote control the chip in the
brain is switched on and the shaking
stops just like that it wasn’t the fact
that she had titanium knees and was
considering to become
neurological cyborg it was everything it
was it was the anesthetics in her body
protecting her from the pain it was the
the computer and the World Wide Web and
the digital video and the very flight I
took to get there I was struck with a
seismic philosophical shake up how had I
come to have such hostility to
technology in society how had I ended up
here well obviously I wasn’t always that
way I’m gonna need to take you back a
little further to when I was 7 I had
seen this film called the children of
theater Street it was 1977 at the height
of the Soviet ballet the film followed
children as they trained for the the
Russian Kirov ballet in Leningrad and I
thought it was the coolest thing I had
ever seen and when I came home I said
dad I know what I want to be a ballet
dancer I ignored his rather confused and
concerned look and trained classically
for 10 years I was interested in
anything that moved
I built puppets and put on puppet shows
I even hacked my old Walkmans in the 80s
and turned them into little little
analog robots that was scurry around the
floor I wasn’t just trying to get a
reaction out of people I wanted to move
people I was fascinated by the power
motion had to trigger emotion there was
no distinction between art and science
or design or engineering or even
philosophy at that age I mean perhaps
were all born natural polymaths
but there are no polymath pathways to
take in our world I had to decide so I
ended up going into the performing arts
I was accepted to the National Theatre
School of Canada where I discovered and
fell in love with the more physical
types of theater theater such as
commedia dell’arte a type of street
theatre popular in the 16th and 17th
century Europe these guys these troops
would literally perform on the back of
an upturned cart in a crazy marketplace
competing with you know a local hanging
over there and a pig being slaughtered
over there
so this bold physicality was required in
order to attract and hold the attention
of the public
in contrast I’d look around in today’s
world and it seemed like we were almost
completely oblivious to the fact that we
had a body technology and society seemed
to be driven by this out of body
identity constipated with cognition
that’s why I rejected technological
society in search of our more wild
nature and I slipped into radicalism I
left dance and theater as well with one
exception puppetry I would build these
little naked puppets and I would perform
with them on the streets all over the
world I would sometimes sit them on the
edge of a garbage can and they would
quietly move I’d have a little puppet
rummage through the garbage and pull out
I don’t know something better packaging
and hand it to somebody watching and
then cheekily
the pub would put out his hand and ask
for a payment in return so for about 10
years I made my living this way
traveling the world and and selling
garbage to people so there I was there I
was working on organic farms performing
on the streets with my little puppets
and selling garbage to people and
rioting having a philosophical crisis
about my cyborg mother I didn’t know
what to do
so I went back to the Unabomber
manifesto and started reading and I
became very curious about his targets
leaders in the field of computer science
robotics and artificial intelligence who
were they I was so surprised by what I
found the very first to build a fully
autonomous electronic robot was William
grey Walter from Bristol he was using
vacuum tubes and relays and he built
these little cybernetic life forms that
looked like tortoises he was
demonstrating how complex and rich
behavior can emerge from very simple
physical elements
I discovered rodney brooks who in the
80s was exploring embodied intelligence
in machines see micro computers were far
too slow back then to be of much use so
he was forced to build robots that had
these decentralized nervous systems made
up of simple little reflexes and then
there was his PhD student cynthia brazil
who was researching social and emotional
intelligence in machines i was totally
stunned these researchers and scientists
saw this world in much the same way as I
did
emergent embodied emotional and it
reminded me of my little analog Walkman
insects I used to build as a kid and
that that philosophical curiosity I had
back then was reawakened so I came to
Bristol to study robotics but I was not
prepared for the culture shock that I
was in for this was not an exaggeration
Chris packages and pop cans piled as
high as they could go the guys that I
was studying robotics with I mean I love
them all but well they were almost all
guys obsessed with logic we bid
disembodied with questionable social and
emotional skills
you see they were they were amazing at
programming and building robots because
that is all they did they were practiced
at it they were less practiced at the
social and emotional stuff these guys
had never seen a live dance performance
in their entire life let alone ever
socially danced so no wonder this is
where we are today our machines are
created in our engineers image we have
these tools that are that are logic
tools that are disembodied I have poor
social and emotional skills but it’s not
just the engineers and scientists there
to blame for this state of affairs the
artists have just as much to answer for
when I finished studying robotics I set
up a technology lab in our local art
college this was a place where students
from the creative industry could come
and learn some basic engineering skills
when most of the art students and even
many of the staff would enter the space
there would be this sharp hiss in
through the teeth and the shoulders
would go up around their ears it was
like an allergic reaction to engineering
one student came in she said you know I
don’t do technology I’m an artist I said
oh well what do you do and she said oh I
do ceramics I said okay well walk me
through what you do as a ceramicist and
she proceeded to tell me about the
material properties of the clay about
the chemistry of the glazes about the
specifics of the kilns and the
temperatures required she was speaking
without a doubt as an engineer and a
scientist so how is this come to be how
would how come engineers arts and
scientists or see themselves are so
different why did we ever do this in the
first place why did we ever walk into a
que with a mouthful of paint and blow a
hand stencil on the wall is it not to
say I am or to say we are perhaps we
can’t help but create representations of
ourself in the world around us from
carving
little figures to the puppets found in
archeological digs all over the world to
the amazing clockwork automata of the
Renaissance to the soft toys we’ve all
loved as children to robots
we have been breathing life into the
inanimate to reflect back on ourselves
and make sense of what on earth is going
on for a very very long time sometimes I
think that many of the robotic engineers
in the labs around the world are just
artists in denial you see there was
nothing radical that our little protest
group was doing in the 90s when we
rejected technology and glorified nature
we were simply regurgitating and
reinforcing age-old identities
there wasn’t a war going on between
nature humanity and technology there
couldn’t be they’re all the same thing
technology wasn’t robbing us of our wild
nature as Ted Kaczynski wrote it is our
wild nature we are so intimately bound
with it and society didn’t need to be
torn down as I once believed it’s the
it’s the walls that society has created
between art and engineering and science
and design that need to be torn down and
that is exactly why we set up this
little laboratory rusty squid we are
creating experiences that can awaken the
human animal and at the same time remind
us of our internet bond with technology
but we have a we have a wee bit of a
problem you see the same identities that
we are trying to challenge out in the
world are getting in the way of our very
own artists and engineers and designers
working effectively together we’ve now
realized that if we want to create a
fundamentally new cultural experience we
need to start working in a fundamentally
different way so we’ve had to go back to
first principles and create
fundamentally new tools I’d like to
share two of those with you before I
leave today
the first one we call story machine
this is basically a non-linear
storyboard for behavior and relationship
design of complex robotic systems our
entire team can come together and they
can share their diverse and specific
understanding of a project with each
other because the relationship between
software mechanics and motion behavior
aesthetics is all equally represented
this tool we call the Rigler for obvious
reasons it’s basically a recording
studio and mixing desk for movement
rather than sound a puppeteer or an
engineer on any any of us can grab the
joysticks and quickly bring a prototype
to life the movement is all recorded and
laid down in tracks and these tracks can
then be edited and tuned and altered and
most importantly is then turned into
kinematic software that then can drive
our robotic creations
so we’ve only just scratched the surface
of these tools and we don’t expect to
solve this in our lifetime we we suspect
that this thing is generational so for
that we’ve started an internship and
each year we invite a young artist a
young engineer and a young designer to
form an ensemble and work alongside our
core team so they can experience what it
is like to have an integrated working
practice and a few years ago we bought
an old derelict building and we’re in
the final stages of building regulations
in the hope to build what we think might
be the first UK or even the world’s
first robotic art and design studio I am
concerned that our civilization is not
prepared for this century if even a
fraction of the technological tsunami
that we are expecting hits us and we are
in for a rough ride and I fear that we
will react badly to the many shocks that
this century could hold it would be very
easy for many of us to slip into that
fierce hostility towards technological
society as I once did and many people I
know did last winter I invited our core
team to each bring their most beloved
childhood toy can you tell which one is
the engineer which one’s the designer
which one’s the illustrator which one’s
the programmer we can’t we’ve just got
far too much in common I suspect that
our only hope for surviving this century
is that we admit that the boundaries
between nature humanity and technology
are only in our mind we need to learn to
see the intimate relationship between
them and we have to challenge this
culture that continues to perpetuate the
divisions between art and engineering
and science and design so that we can
face this uncertain future with an
honest and integrated embrace thank you
very much
[Music]
you
Please follow and like us: