Conference
Exhibition 2022
Mónica Rikić
Mother of Robots
And here comes a final rhythm that stretches across the space of the city: a long wave that drags all the immutable truths of metropolitan life, before taking us back to a distant shore whose details are still difficult to discern. What will it mean for us to live in that space and time? How can we understand the opportunities it offers us as individuals or as members of society? If we have only just begun to do accounts with the construction of the new ordinary in our present, how are we going to make sense of it in the future city? Let's face it: none of our instincts will be able to guide our access to the normality that lies ahead.
Adam Greenfield
Radical technologies: the design of everyday life
In that wonderful manual of use of the "radical technologies" of the everyday entitled Radical technologies: the design of everyday life, Adam Greenfield opens our eyes about the technologies currently involved in everyday life and that will be increasingly so in the future: smartphones, internet of things (IoT ) and artificial intelligence (AI). In the
introductory chapter of the book, entitled "Pari s año cero", he describes the functioning of a smart city , whose rhythm is regulated by new technologies and in which citizens relate to each other and to the things that make it up through a ubiquitous interface: the mobile.
The rhythms of the city of the future are marked by sensors and an unlimited set of devices that collect data scattered in the daily environment by a barely visible network that connects them, while within this network we citizens are already cyborgs, because we are disabled when we are deprived of that universal prosthesis that is the smartphone. Digital information technology through the Internet is the dominant modality through which we experience daily life in the city. Every day our interaction with things and people is mediated by algorithms, by robots whose presence is so normalized that it goes practically unnoticed. The understanding of its functioning is unevenly distributed in society, depending on the level of technological and digital literacy of people, as well as the power to actively intervene in its design or modification, or simply to control its influence on our behavior, our mind or our culture in general. Society is moving towards increasing automation and we know little of its consequences. It is very likely that gradually the urban landscape itself will be increasingly regulated, simplified, modeled after the needs of these new posthuman inhabitants.
Mare de robots (Mother of robots) is an interactive installation in which game, robotics and sociology intersect. Its objective is to speculate and visualize from art the effects and future results of the hybrid society between humans and artificial entities that we are already building. It uses game-inspired social simulation as a research methodology for hybrid speculative societies and shows technology as a container framework and generator of social construction and collective intelligence.
The installation simulates the generation and autonomous evolution of that hybrid and posthuman society, in which only a subtle line – in the form of an interface – separates human and artificial citizens, through a system of multiple BDI agents formed by a mother environment and ten intelligent robots in motion. The type of society, its values and its citizens – robots – are previously defined through collective thinking workshops about the future we want to project. The public of the exhibition has the possibility to participate actively in that world through interactions with tablets, one per robot, and influence the behavior and evolution of such a speculative society. It has a vital record of each robot, where you can see their information, evolution and desires that they want to achieve to be happy. Of such desires, some can be achieved by themselves, while others require human interaction, but each action will have a social consequence to be taken into account. The robots move through the space and communicate with each other and with the public based on the parameters of behavior and social status they occupy. Likewise, the public will be able to communicate with them or change their position in the space to affect their possibilities of relationship and communication, attending or not to the needs that the robots themselves express. For this exhibition, the artist has created avatars of robots in motion in virtual space, while physical robots are exhibited in demo mode in the room.
