MMI 1: Gastvortrag: Marc Böhlen - Machines for Supermodernity

Dienstag 14.12.04, 12:00 Uhr
LMU Hauptgebäude, Raum 129

Abstract

Marc Augé‘s supermodernity is the age we currently live in: Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges and subway stations. We are all familiar with these curious spaces that are everywhere and nowhere, these non-spaces, and we know the machines that inhabit these spaces: Cash machines, video surveillance systems, and wireless internet hotspots. Functional and reliable, such systems often enforce the uncanny feeling of alienation one senses in non-spaces. Are there alternatives? Can we devise machines that react differently to impersonal non-spaces - and which kinds of interaction models should we build for such machines?

I will argue that the media arts hold promise as a source of inspiration for radically different concepts of interaction in supermodernity. Based on examples from select artists from the 1970s to the present, such as Beuys, Raad, Huyghe and my own work, I will show some experimental approaches in interaction and situation design, such as the idea of critical and multimode machines, and animal-machine interaction.

Biography

Marc Böhlen’s practice fuses robotics research with cultural analysis into the field of mediarobotics. After studies in Art History and Electrical Engineering he worked at IBM Research Laboratories in Zürich on performance analysis of high-powered semiconductor GaAs pump laser diodes for long haul fiber optic surface and submersed communication systems. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Fine Arts and Robotics, he was appointed Research Fellow at the University of California at San Diego at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is currently faculty member at the University of Buffalo in the Department of Media Study where he is director of the MediaRobotics Lab.

Böhlen makes machines that challenge one’s expectation towards automation processes. His work focuses on the consequences of automated measurement and control in domains ranging from bad breath to plant growth, fingerprint identification, animal husbandry, and whistled voices. Recent work has been featured at CIBERARTS 2004 in Bilbao and SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles. Recent and upcoming speaker engagements include talks at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, the Information Science Series at Cornell University, Harvard University and The University of California at Irvine. Recent publications include contributions to the IEEE 2004 Special Edition Journal on Pervasive Computing in the Arts, the AAAI 2004 Spring Symposium on Interaction between Humans and Autonomous Systems over Extended Operation, and COSIGN2004, Computational Semiotics in Games and New Media.

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