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cognition

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FCJ-207 Game On: A Creative Enquiry into Agency and the Nature of Cognition in Distributed Systems

By ⋅ January 22, 2017 ⋅ Post a comment

Michaela Davies [Abstract] Introduction The focus of this paper is a participatory artwork, Game On, which is a boxing “game” where one participant can control the actions of another via electric muscle stimulation. [1] The paper explores Game On as a creative enquiry into agency and the nature of cognition in distributed systems. Game On explores what happens to agency in a system where embodied experience is disrupted or extended, based on the understanding that a sense of personal agency is created through actions, and that the actions of others influence our understanding of ourselves as separate from them. Participatory artworks like Game On can be viewed as a form of performative research, creating a system which is analogous in some ways to states of affairs outside that system. [2] In this way, Game On does more than represent possibility: it enables an exploration, in real time and space, of…

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FCJ-206 From Braitenberg’s Vehicles to Jansen’s Beach Animals: Towards an Ecological Approach to the Design of Non-Organic Intelligence

By ⋅ January 22, 2017 ⋅ Post a comment

Maaike BleekerUtrecht University [Abstract] For more than twenty years now, Dutch artist and engineer Theo Jansen has been invested in the development of new, non-organic species that he refers to as Strandbeesten, which in English translates to “beach animals”. His beach animals are creatures constructed from plastic conduit normally used to house electric cables, ropes, plastic bottles and pieces of sailcloth. He describes them as ‘skeletons that are able to walk on the wind’. They are called ‘animals’, yet they are completely inorganic. They use the wind to propel themselves and require no other fuel or food. Over time, Jansen has managed to develop creatures that are increasingly capable of ‘surviving’ on their own. His ideal plan is to put the beach animals out in herds on the beaches and have them live their own ‘life’. [1] The intricate complexity and transparency of the beach animals, and the precision of…

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