“Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean. Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.”
Ghost Drummer by Bartek Szlachcic explores graphic qualities in process of playing on a drum kit. Besides being a musician, a drummer when playing is unconsciously engaged in an elaborate choreography. Motion-captured movements become a visual map over a time revealing fragile rhythm structures and invisible notations behind energetic instrumental solo.
“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness… By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and bodily heat-controls - all such extensions of our bodies, including cities - will be translated into information systems.”
“There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.”
“It starts off with “huh?”, a sense of mystification about what the algorithm could be responding to. Then there’s a kind of aesthetic of the glitch. “Oh it’s a screw up, how funny and slightly troubling”. But then finally, the more of these I saw, the more the effect started to feel truly other: like a coherent, but alien idea of what faces were. It made me wonder what I was missing. “What is it seeing there?”
— Greg Borenstein - Machine Pareidolia: Hello Little Fella meets FaceTracker
“The Techno Rebels are, whether they recognise it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much a part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.”
— Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave (1980)
“I don’t like [the Turing Test] that much, in part because I don’t care about the philosophy angle. I want to build something useful. We already know how to make humans; I made two of them.”
— Peter Norvig - Google’s go-to AI guy sees phones getting much smarter
Ljus by Zackery Belanger was designed by applying swarm intelligence to a three-dimensional point cloud of Leah Jung. By giving each point in the cloud autonomy and assessing mathematical relationships to surrounding points, swarm behavior was harnessed, and through a linearly-constrained transformation, a chair based on the human form was defined.
Larry the African Grey Parrot dials an imaginary phone number, rambles a little, then starts laughing.
Wikipedia says: “Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s research with captive African greys, most notably with a bird named Alex, has scientifically demonstrated that they possess the ability to associate simple human words with meanings, and to intelligently apply the abstract concepts of shape, colour, number, zero-sense, etc. According to Pepperberg and other ornithologists[who?], they perform many cognitive tasks at the level of dolphins, chimpanzees, and even a human toddler.”
