Bill Vorn will exhibit his two robotic works "Red Light" and "Hysterical Machines" at Wood Street Galleries, 601 Wood Street, in Pittsburgh's Cultural District beginning Friday, April 29, 2011 during The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Gallery Crawl on Friday, April 29, from 5:30-9 p.m. The exhibition will close on Sunday, June 19, 2011.
"The questions posed by Vorn's work are not about whether the robots have true emotion or intelligence, but rather about what they evoke in us, their users," notes curator Murray Horne. "In a dramatic fashion, Vorn's robots respond to our interactivity as 'state of mind.' In questioning our relations, connections or fantasies concerning robots, we may end up imagining what the robot is feeling about us."
ABOUT THE ARTIST AND ARTWORKThe first prototype of the Hysterical Machine (renamed Prehysterical Machine) has been presented at the Sentient Circuitry show at the Walter Philips Gallery (Banff) in 2002, the Fundacion Telefonica kiosk at Arco (Madrid, Spain) in 2003, and at the FILE 2004 festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil). Since then we have built ten more machines inspired by the prehysterical prototype that are part of a larger scale environment (Hysterical Machines).
Each Hysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). Some machines are suspended from the ceiling and their arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robots to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. They react to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli they receive. The perceived emergent behaviors of these machines engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards characters which are nothing more than articulated metal structures. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creatures, which are neither animals nor humans, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
Red Light (2005)Eight machines react to the presence of viewers by generating sound and light and by moving their body in a very organic but unusual way. Each robot is an assembly of four segments joined by twelve McKibben actuators (air muscles). Six machines are hanging from the ceiling and two machines are convulsing on the floor.
The artificial characters in the Red Light environment are complex machines that could generate a wide number of possible behaviors. These behaviors are also adaptive in response to what the machines perceive and the way viewers decide to interact with them: by touching the robots, by moving around them, by simply standing in front of these untamed tentacles. The title of this installation project evokes a particular situation/context where the actors are expressing themselves through unpredictable behaviors that may seem completely wild or crazy, where the interpretation of these behaviors may even lead to believe in their own true existence. Red Light is a place where the human qualities of the machine and the machinic nature of man are intermixed and become blurred.
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