Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) Absolutely, completely and totally amazing! Thank God the inventors described it and provided a video, because I have no words for this awesomeness of a complicated machine. Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman have created the “ABSOLUT QUARTET”, an “automated multi-instrumental orchestral machine, a larg…

(TrendHunter.com) A collaboration of nine research groups from Europe, Israel, and the US have teamed up to build a robotic rat with a unique feature: it has functioning whiskers!

Traditionally, sensors used for robotics are usually non-contact based, such as vision sensors, laser range finders, and ultra-sonic tr…

Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns have collaborated on a new art work which investigates one of the possible human-robot relationships.

Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positions, “Sleep Waking” acts as a way to “play-back” dreams.

I asked Fernando to give us more details about the robot:

How does Sleep Waking work exactly?

I spent a night at The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in Albany, NY. There they wired me up with a variety of sensors, recording everything from EEG to EKG to eye positioning data. We then took that data and interpreted it in two ways:

The eye position data we simply apply to the position the robot’s heads is looking. So if my eye was looking left, the robot looks left.

The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The “behaviors” the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream.

We also use robot vision for navigation and keeping the robot on its pedestal. This camera is mounted about three feet above the robot and it not shown in the documentation.

Video:

What do you think the robot can bring to our understanding of possible human-robot relationships?

Sleep Waking is a metaphor for a reality that could be in our future. In the piece we use a fair amount of artistic license. Though the eye positioning data is a literal interpretation, what we do with the EEG data is a bit more subjective. However, perhaps one day we will have the technology to literally allow a robot to act out what we do in our dreams. What could we learn from seeing our dreams played back for us? Will we save our dreams like we save our photographs?

Taking a wider view, robots are increasingly used to augment human experience. From robotic prosthetic devices, personalized web presences, and implanted RFID chips, technology is moving from being an externalized tool, to being a literal extension of who we are. By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means.

Did you use an existing robot or did you build it from scratch?

We used a modified Kondo KHR-2HV humaniod robot. In the next iteration of this piece, we will be fabricating my own design for a humanoid robot.

Thanks Fernando!

See Sleep Waking at the BRAINWAVE: Common Senses exhibition which opens on February 16 at Exit Art.

Another of Fernando’s work, 8520 S.W.27th Pl. v.2, is still on view at the Emergentes exhibition at the LABoral center in Gijon, Spain until May 12, 2008.

(TrendHunter.com) Have you ever looked at a painting or sculpture that had eyes that seemed to watch you?

You can try to convince yourself all you want that this wall mount isn’t watching you, but in this case, your paranoid instinct would be right.

The Opto-Isolator is the creepy invention of Golan Levin and Gre…

(TrendHunter.com) $15,000 for possibly the ugliest chair ever designed? Why so much? Because the chair walks. No need to ask your robot to rearrange the furniture, just ask your chair to take a hike. The makers went strictly low budget on the looks with the chrome legs and opaque seat, and put their money in the brai…

Toy robots at The Toy Museum in Prague, Summer 2007

Chatbots.org — an entire blog dedicated to various chatbots. Also see Chatbothub.com, a chatbot developer community.

Ever since i heard the endearing and hilarious talk of Wim Delvoye (ha! every single gesture or word from this guy screams “Belgium!”) at ars electronica last September, i’m trying to follow the episodes of his Cloaca adventure.

Wim Delvoye, Untitled, 2004

The Casino de Luxembourg has recently held a retrospective exhibition of Delvoye’s defecating machines.

The whole family was there: Cloaca Original, Cloaca – New & Improved, Cloaca Turbo, Cloaca Quattro, Cloaca N° 5, Super Cloaca and Personal Cloaca. Plus original drawings, 3D and x-ray photographs, models of Cloaca Clinic gates, videos, sealed bags of Cloaca Faeces and other paraphernalia.

The brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca (on the left), was premiered at the Casino. The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

The idea of a mechanical reproduction of the human digestive system goes back to the Digesting Duck by 18th century engineer Jacques de Vaucanson and just like Piero Manzoni ‘s Merda d’artista [Artist’s shit] Delvoye’s machines can be regarded as an assault on the system of art.

The best part of the exhibition for me were the video extracts of tv films about Cloaca.

Favourite is an extract of “Is This Sh*t Art”, an episode from the very very brilliantissimo Art Safari.

Ben Lewis had a series for BBC4 where he’d go and meet the most iconic figures of contemporary art. He condensed his approach in an article he wrote about his encounter with Delvoye:

I will go to any lengths to find out if art means something. Just talking to the artist and looking at the work is never enough. The artists are usually inarticulate, or English is their second language, or they’re just not very bright. None of these criticisms was true of Delvoye – but his art was so ambiguous it was impossible to work out what it meant. Was it raising up the lowly, or humbling the mighty? Was it optimistic or cynical?

In this case not only did Lewis get himself the same tattoo as one of Delvoye’s pigs (video extract), he also ate the same meal as a Cloaca machine, gathered some of the product of its digestion, went to the toilet, collected some of his own faecal matter and brought the two samples to a laboratory. The scientist compared the two samples bacteriologically and found them very similar. Video:

I could not find the other videos online, except this extract from Eurotrash. Definitely not the best of what i’ve seen there but if you’re interested in cloaca’s farting problems and the solution to it…
Video:

I realized that what i liked best in Delvoye’s work was not that much the work itself but to listen to Delvoye talk about it. Cloaca, he said in an interview, is not about aesthetics. Each machine is in total synchronicity with the advances of technology, there is no frivolity. Every single element you see has its function: you pour the food into the “oral” side of the machine, it is then processed by a series of mechanical organs (there is the stomach, the small intestine and the colon). Yet, Cloaca is not a commentary of science and is not either meant to be useful. The artist actually refused to sell one of his machines to a diaper company that hoped to use it for tests.

Delvoye also set himself the task to insert the products of Cloaca in the global economic system. The Casino Luxembourg had a special Wim shop where you could buy a Wim action figure but also a whole range of Cloaca products: Cloaca T-shirts, a 3D Viewmaster, Cloaca toilet paper, posters, etc. But that’s just a merchandising detail: the Cloaca machines are works of art which produce works of art. On show were dozens of vacuum-packed Cloaca eliminations made during the 5 first exhibits of the machine around the world. There’s apparently a waiting list of collectors eager to buy one of those, and the faeces made during the New York exhibition are the most sought-after. The matter is irradiated with gamma rays to kill bacteria, dried and vacuum-packed. After that they are packed air-tight in a plexiglass box. In 2003, they were offered for sale online. The faeces were also integrated into the company Cloaca Limited as a contribution in nature.

Cloaca-X-Rayed, 2003

Cloaca X-Rayed immediately brings to mind another famous art piece by Delvoye: his X-ray views of people having sex which he then turned into stained-glass church windows. Utilizing mammograms, sonograms and MRI’s in addition to standard X rays, the artist captured skinny (they had to fit inside the machines) models tongue kissing, masturbating, or doing blow jobs. The key to getting such images was to slather the models with barium powder mixed with Nivea cream in order to “illuminate” the bones during x-raying.

I give the microphone back to Ben Lewis: Delvoye’s work satirises the art world, with its inflated prices and daft intellectual cul-de-sacs. Cloaca makes the ultimate criticism of modern art – that most of it is crap; that the art world has finally disappeared up its own backside. ‘When I was going to art school, all my family said I was wasting my time, and now I have made a work of art about waste,’ he told me happily.

My set of images.

(TrendHunter.com) Dig out your copy of Planet of the Apes or Netflix it, because monkeys are operating robots. A 12 pound monkey in North Carolina activated a 200 pound robot to walk on a treadmill using only brain activity. It was the first time this had occured. The Duke University lab team proved that monkeys cou…

I remembered a great quote from an old colleague of mine: “The web is the only medium in which you must create content which impresses machines.” This is especially true for headlines, and, increasingly, not only blog headlines. With online versions of traditional newspapers adding Digg Me buttons and incorporating automated contextual advertising and other technological novelties, the fine art of headline writing is under more and tighter constraints then ever before. Why and for what purpose are headlines written today?

1. For others to read the article. That’s what headlines and titles (there’s a difference: headlines have verbs in them) have been invented for, after all: to attract readers’ attention to the content under them. A corollary: it also needs to attract readers’ attention when it is found out of its original context, for example, on someone else’s site.
2. For others to notice it in the RSS reader (this was a topic of a separate post on RSS usability last year).
3. For the author to like it. This is straightforward: you wouldn’t slap a subjectively ugly headline on your article (although in newspapers, copy editors often do) because you will be the one staring at it before anyone else sees it. And long after that, too.
4. For the author to find it. How do you link back to your old posts relevant to the subject at hand? I use my own search box, and I got into the habit of using keywords that I’m likely to remember months or even years down the road.
5. For others to find it. This is the non-profit SEO part where you write you headline so that it comes up for a search on the topic the article is about and helps someone out. This means two things: the article needs to be in the top search results, and the headline needs to prompt the click.
6. For others to find it, for a different reason. In the for-profit world of SEO, you’ll write your headline so that it drives people who search for something that your site in general (but not necessarily each particular post) is promoting. The real trick here is to make the headline keyword-rich without it sounding artificial.
7. For others to find it again, in their own information universe. It is terribly difficult to locate something you’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us when your bookmark count is in the thousands unless you know (or, importantly, you think you know) what the title was (Tags, while invented for a good purpose, are a mess).
8. For the AdSense funnel, where the searcher clicks on your link in the search engine, arrives at your blog, looks around, and then bounces off through a well-targeted AdSense ad that is closer to what he’s been searching for in the first place.
9. For AdSense robots to display the right ads. I don’t really know how much weight is assigned by the AdSense and other contextual ad algorithms to headlines, but it has to be significant since post titles are also page titles.
10. To influence social forces on Digg and other similar content microcosms. There are plenty of guides on writing Diggable headlines out there.

CyberLover chat bot reports back your romantic progress through a status bar.

Reuters: “A Russian website called CyberLover.ru is advertising a software tool that, it says, can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It boasts that it can chat up as many as 10 women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers. The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine’s Day, said the CyberLover.ru website. “Not a single girl has yet realized that she was communicating with a program!” it said, adding that the program could also simulate virtual sex online.” (Emphasis mine.)

The site, which is not quite ready for the prime-time yet, also suggests that the software could be used not only to hit up girls, but also to coax guys into parting with their money, or to advertise your website.

The screenshot is one of the two available on CyberLover.ru (they have conveniently added a header in English for the curious Westerners). The columns in the table are: nickname, progress (in percentages, no less), number of messages received, and the time of the last received message.) The progress bar is truly priceless. Average throughput: 10-20 people in 30 minutes.

Dunno. Would be cool if it were real, but it says 2005 on the screenshots, so it can be anything. I’ll put it on the calendar and make sure to follow up in two months, though.