Art Com Magazine

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From: fjt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Frederick John Truck)
Subject: Art Com Magazine
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Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1993 00:01:37 GMT
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AUGUST 1993 NUMBER 62 VOLUME 14 NUMBER 4
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Welcome to ART COM, an online magazine forum dedicated to the
interface of contemporary art and new communication technologies.

You are invited to send information for possible inclusion. We
are especially interested in options that can be acted upon:
including conferences, exhibitions, and publications. Proposals
for guest edited issues are also encouraged. Send submissions to:

artcomtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Back issues of ART COM can be accessed on the Art Com
Electronic Network (ACEN) on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
(WELL), available through the CompuServe Packet Network
and PC Pursuit.

To access the Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL,
enter g acen at the Ok: prompt. The Art Com Electronic
Network is also accessible on USENET as alt.artcom.
For access information, send email to: artcomtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.

*Guest Editor: Vernon Reed, vreed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Editor: Carl Eugene Loeffler
*Systems: Fred Truck and Gil MinaMora

Vernon Reed was a jeweler in another life, but a conversion
experience mutated his artwork into wearable microsystems. He is
working toward a goal of externalizing and transmitting wearers'
internal (physical and much later pychological) states, by virtue of
donning sophisticated biosensing cybernetic jewels. Turn on, jack
in, connect!

ART COM projects include:

ART COM MAGAZINE, an electronic forum dedicated to
contemporary art and new communication technologies.

ART COM ELECTRONIC NETWORK (ACEN), an electronic
network dedicated to contemporary art, featuring publications,
online art galleries, art information database, and bulletin boards.

ART COM SOFTWARE, international distributors of interactive
video and computer art.

ART COM TELEVISION, international distributors of innovative
video to broadcast television and cultural presenters.

CONTEMPORARY ARTS PRESS, publishers and distributors of
books on contemporary art, specializing in postmodernism, video,
computer and performance art.

ART COM, P.O.B. 193123 Rincon,San Francisco,CA,94119-
3123,USA.
WELL E-MAIL: artcomtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
TEL: 415.431.7524 FAX: 415.431.7841
____________________________________________
Mr Lizard Goes to Robofest
by Vernon Reed
vreed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

The giant mylar blimp flaps its comical dragonfly wings, barely
missing the basketball hoop, while a score of enchanted children
and bemused adults mark its progress through the gymnasium
airspace. High above the Internet Demo area, it starts to spiral
downward, until its awkwardly kicking legs come into view on the
Dweeb Vision monitor.

Welcome to Robofest 4, the annual festival of homebrew robotics
and cyberarts, put on by members of Austin's Robot Group.

This wildly eclectic posse of artists, engineers and tinkerers has
been meeting on a continuing basis since 1989 to develop their
unique vision of robotics and art. Their raw enthusiasm and can-do
attitude has produced the swirl of events and machines here in
Kealing Junior High School, and the crowd is loving it. For this
fourth iteration of the event, something new has been added,
volunteer assistance and demos by members of the Austin
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a local cyberspace civil
liberties advocacy group. The extra help has made it possible for
the Robot Group members to concentrate on making and refining
robots, and the added events have given the festival greater
dimension and capacity for public outreach, making this possibly
the best Robofest yet.

Robofest is where high tech meets the masses, and if the masses
didn't always understand what they were seeing, at least they found
it entertaining, as opposed to robotics' usual image as dull,
menacing, or both. Audience participation was encouraged by
many of the exhibits, and others were relentlessly didactic, though
in a fun way. I think it is safe to say that many young minds, and
even a few older ones, were stimulated enough by this encounter to
seek out further information about robotics and tech art.

As a member of the EFF volunteer group, I had rather a lizard's eye
view of the affair, having to scurry back constantly to the event that
I was producing, the Speakers' Room. But in between and behind
that, here is what Robofest 4 looked and sounded like to me:

The physical space for the fest comprised several large rooms in a
public school-- a gymnasium and another large room, plus a
cafeteria/meeting hall. This newly larger space allowed the exhibits
to spread out and enabled the crowd to breathe easier than in years
past, when it often became impossible to walk across the exhibit
area. It also facilitated some brand new events.

The dominant features of the larger room, whenever they were
flying, were the blimps, 20 foot long aluminized mylar airships with
instrument platforms slung beneath their bulk. I have already
described one of them, the Ornithopter. Although not really a robot,
but rather a radio controlled airship, it was nonetheless captivating
by its sheer zaniness. Looking like a blimp designed by Hieronymus
Bosch (in reality, by Founding Member David Santos), it flew by
flapping its absurdly undersized wings, and when near the floor it
ran on a pair of semi-realistic plastic legs.

The other blimp, the Mark IV Robotic Airship, by Alex Iles, Bill
Craig, Craig Sainsott, and John Lovgren, with video link by John
Witham, was a different animal altogether, representing an
intimidating exercise in autonomous movement in 3-space. The
computers attached to it permitted operation in three distinct
modes: radio control, data gathering, and autonomous navigation.
The first mode is trivial from the standpoint of robotics. The second
mode, data gathering, allows for movement directed from the radio
control section to be used to train a neural net, and the third mode
frees the wispy behemoth to roam the still air according to its own
initiatives (theoretically). That third mode was damned hard to
achieve, though, and it spent most of its time in R/C mode during
the fest. It was propelled by gimbal-mounted fans, a much more
efficient, though not as entertaining, method than wings.

While straining upward to follow the movement of the blimps, one
could easily trip over the Dweeb Vision telepresence platform as it
scuttled around the floor, sending back video of Robofest from
roughly a Chihuahua's point of view. This ingenious and endearing
little device was put together by Glenn Currie on a very tight
budget, by gutting an R/C car and strapping a CCD video camera to
it, transmitting back to a monitor through a Rabbit low power video
transmitter.

A much heftier and more versatile version of this idea was also
roaming the gym floor, Vadim Konradi's Mobile Platform. This was a
true robot, a two wheeled vehicle capable of autonomous
movement, conceived as a platform on which to mount sensing and
navigation experiments. It, too, sent CCD video images via a Rabbit
transmitter, but the most unusual aspect of this device was the
cellular phone strapped to the top, through which the digital link to
its managing computer was maintained via modem. This was an
elegant piece of work, and one with probably the most potential of
any robots I saw there.

The Varmit, a mildly menacing skeletal walker robot by David
Santos and Mark Dommers, was going through its paces (literally)
nearby. The actuators for this and most of the other robots were
pneumatic, so when this Saint-Bernard sized welded steel critter
started walking toward you, every joint of all four legs hissed with
every movement. It was very definitely a work in progress, but
impressive anyway, if only for its sheer strangeness (and the fact
that it did not fall down!).

An exciting new feature at robofest this year was the Internet
Demo, put together by Doug Barnes of the Austin EFF and staffed
by EFF volunteers. Nestled into one corner of the gym, it housed a
number of PCs and SPARC notebooks, all running Unix and
connected to the Internet using SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol).
The volunteers here were busy showing interested parties how to
navigate through the contemporary cyberspace of the Net,
demonstrating such resources as email, news, various net archives,
gopher services and databases. It was an excellent opportunity to
try out Net access and many people availed themselves of it.

Just around the corner from the Net Demo, Dave Demaris set up a
demo of a really intriguing software project he is working on. I
spoke at length with him about it. He has built a model using the
MAX computer music system, which implements a system called
"coupled map lattices". This is related to cellular automata, in that it
is a ring or lattice of cells connected to nearest neighbors, and at
each time step they compute a function with some influence from
neighboring cells. One variable in the computed function can cause
each cell to range from cyclic behavior to chaotic, and this change
was readily apparent in the musical output from the system. The
cell variables were partly based on a model of a distributed neuro-
chemical system in human nerve networks, and he was speculating
about possible relationships to emotional communication, as well as
branching off into a whole other connection with architecture. This
was some of the most intellectually stimulating art I have
encountered in a while.

The remainder of the large room was given over to a grab bag of
different projects and demos, all done on low to zero budget and
ranging from conceptually slick to terminally sophomoric. One of the
best was the Hovercraft, by David Hutchings and Tim Sheridan.
This wacky vehicle consisted of a large disk with a grab bar on top.
Air was forced under the disk from a remote air source, causing the
disk to float on a thin cushion of air, and anyone riding on top could
cause it to veer in different directions by leaning this way or that
while holding the grab bar. It looked like a fun ride.

On the down side, there was a "LBJ School Science Contest"
section which had some projects of almost absurd simplicity, even
allowing for the age of the children. In between were such oddities
as the robot garbage can, and the railgun simulation which never
seemed to quite work right.

Going out into the hall and down to the next door, one arrived at
another large room, dominated by two art/music performance
assemblages. A group of machines known as "The Robot Band"
took up most of the space along one wall and the techno-tribal band
"Liquid Mice" occupied the adjacent wall, creating a large corner
given over to MIDI keyboards and pneumatic robots.

The Robot Band is an on-going creation of erstwhile jeweler and
artist Craig Sainsott, who produces the MIDI-controlled percussion
playing robots to combine his love for art and for music. The actual
sculptures, and these pneumatic bots can stand alone as valid art
objects in their own right, were assembled from the cast-off detritus
of a medium tech society. Neon tubes surround enigmatic signage
from forgotten road projects, with speakers worked into mock
African looking masks; steel hands grasp bamboo poles. It is a
melange of found and constructed objects, connected by Sainsott's
artistic sensibility and his skill in metal and plastic fabrication. I was
particularly impressed with the robot dancer which fronted the
group, a four-legged spastic dervish that seemed perpetually ready
to topple over. The Robot Band was visually tight in a way that I
missed in much of the other work at Robofest. The musical
performances of the band were less impressive, consisting largely
of canned synthesizer sequences, along with tracks for controlling
the pneumatic actuators which caused drums to pound, sticks to
rattle, cymbals to chime, etc.

Liquid Mice played a set on Saturday afternoon. Visually, at least,
their image is probably best described as "Thunder Dome" retro-
techno, as exemplified by the fairly vicious looking pneumatic
junkyard dog sort of robot crouched among their props.

Another creative high point was an installation by Marcos Novak, of
the U of Texas Architecture Dept. This was part of his Primitive
Stance series and he calls it:

RoboRoom I Given: 1 the primitive stance 2 head tracking

Novak and his students put together on short notice an environment
which consisted of a 10' x 10' or so square of turf (as in grass) with
white sheets hanging above, billowing in a fan-generated wind.
Scattered around this turf square were a number of household
appliances, such as blenders, electric fans, weed eaters, etc; each
associated with an incandescent light bulb. The person
experiencing this installation donned an arm-type head tracker from
Shooting Star, which told the controlling computer where the
person's head was pointing. Whenever that direction coincided with
the location of one of the appliances, that device started to run and
its associated light bulb was lit. There was also a video monitor
present, showing some sort of generic vr environment. When this
piece is fleshed out, the participant will be wearing vr goggles and
the monitor will show what that person is seeing. Even without that
added layer of complexity, I found this to be one of the most
interesting installations, as it has important implications for "making
reality virtual".

Next to Marcos' RoboRoom was a Mandala installation by John
Witham and Karen Pittman. This Amiga-based system was
projecting onto a large screen, and used video cameras to extract
scene information for controlling the parameters of whatever
program was running. These programs included Zap Ball, where
two or more people tried to control the flight of a virtual ball in the
projected image; a similar program, Orbit, used circles rather than
balls. There were also body painting programs and Stars, which
allowed players to juggle with virtual stars, along with a couple of
drum playing scenes. This Mandala installation was quite popular
with the crowd, most of whom had never been "inside" any kind of
virtual system before.

Leaving this room and going all the way to the end of the long hall,
fairgoers arrived at the last room, which housed a program new this
year for Robofest. The Speakers' Room was host to an ongoing
series of lectures by guest speakers, both from within the Robot
Group and from outside, who had expertise on a wide range of
subjects relating to robots and cyberarts.

The first speaker was noted cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, who
talked about the state of the art in contemporary commercial robots.
His witty and informed lecture made it easy to understand why we
still do not have robot housemaids after all these years, and why
robots do not look anything like humans.

Ben Kuiper, of the U of Texas Computer Science Dept, talked about
his ongoing research, which uses robots as tools for understanding
how the human mind works. He presented a model for autonomous
robot navigation, which gives priority to topology over geometry in
modeling an unknown space, through a "modular series of
reasoning loops." This is an analogy for creation of cognitive maps
in humans, and hopefully in AI systems.

Next, Glenn Currie gave a talk about the history and aims of the
Robot Group. The final speakers for Saturday were Alex Iles and
Bill Craig, who discussed their involvement with autonomous
navigation and pattern recognition. They gave some interesting
insights about the difficulties of navigation for walkers and airships,
as opposed to wheeled robots.

The first speaker on Sunday was Bob Nansel from Seattle. He
talked about what his organization was up to, and devoted much of
his time to a fairly technical exposition of something he called the
"Robot Builder Interface", or ROBI, standard. This is a proposed set
of standards for creating modular robotic components, thus
avoiding a certain amount of needless wheel reinvention. One very
amusing part of his talk was a video showing robot sumo matches
in Japan (for real!).

Yours truly was next, speaking about my work with wearable
microsystems. I showed videos of current cybernetic jewels, and
talked about the implications of this work for interfacing to the
"bioapparatus", as I call the technological skin we are growing over
our organic life form.

Glenn Currie followed with a repeat of his talk about the Robot
Group, and the last speaker was Vadim Konradi. He discussed his
work with the Mobile Platform (described earlier), and demonstrated
some of its capabilities.

On the whole, the event came across pretty much as a techie
school carnival, and I think that helped to demystify the subject for a
large portion of the people who attended. If they cared to, however,
attendees could get into some pretty deep discussions with the
exhibitors, as well as gain hands-on experience with a few of the
systems.

My main criticism is this: for a group claiming to be composed of
artists and engineers, the esthetic side of their projects is almost
always subjugated to sheer expediency. It was understandable in
1989 when they first started, but four year later one begins to
expect something more. Perhaps they should drop the art
pretensions and just call it home-brew robotics, because the
engineering side of the equation is impressive and getting more so.
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