Behavior and Misbehavior: A Path to Believable Living Machines

Bill Vorn – Professional Artist, Professor at Concordia University

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Based in Montreal, Bill Vorn is active in the field of Robotic Art since 1992. His installation and performance projects involve robotics and motion control, sound, lighting, video and cybernetic processes. He pursues research and creation on Artificial Life and Agent Technologies through artistic work based on the Aesthetics of Artificial Behaviors. He holds a PhD degree in Communication Studies from UQAM (Montreal) for his thesis on Artificial Life as a Media. He teaches Electronic Arts as a Full Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University. His work has been presented in multiple international events, including Ars Electronica, ISEA, DEAF, Sonar, Art Futura, EMAF and Artec. He has been awarded a Numix award (2016, Montreal), the Vida 2.0 award (1999, Madrid), the Leprecon Award for Interactivity (1998, New York), the Prix Ars Electronica Distinction award (1996, Linz) and the International Digital Media Award (1996, Toronto).

Motion as artistic matter

Jean-Paul Laumond – Professor and Director of Research at CNRS

Motion representation is a challenge for painting and sculpture from the very beginning of art. With the development of cybernetics in the middle of the twentieth century, motion appears for the first time as a matter by itself. Thenceforth, motion becomes a matter of representation as well as colored pigments for painting and stones for sculpture. From the mobiles of Calder to the moving trees of Bousier de Mougenot, via the Floats of Breer, we will browse some artistic devices to illustrate the purpose. Then we will see how the progresses of robotics technology open new routes for artistic development. As sophisticated as technology is, the central question remains the share of dreams art is conveying: « Dream is everything, technique can be learned », Tinguely said.

Jean-Paul Laumond – IEEE Fellow, is a roboticist. He is Directeur de Recherche at CNRS. His research is devoted to robot motion. He has published more than 150 papers in international journals in Robotics, Computer Science, Control and Neurosciences. He has been the 2011-2012 recipient of the Chaire Innovation technologique Liliane Bettencourt at Collège de France in Paris. He is a member of the French Academy of Technologies and Academy of Sciences.

Reborn

Justine Emard – Professional Artist

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Justine Emard is a visual artist, based in Paris, France. She creates displays to explore the relations between our existences and technologies. Through different types of interactions, she explores a crossing between robotics, objects, artificial intelligence and life, based on deep learning experiences and human-machine dialogues. Her practice revolves around video, installation, photography and augmented reality. Since 2011, she shows her work in France and abroad into individual and group exhibitions. She is laureate of the residency Hors-les-murs of the Institut Français and Tokyo Wonder Site in Tokyo, for her project Reborn in Japan. She participates to “Clouds ⇄ Forests”, the 7th International Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and she performed “Parade for the End of the World” for Yokohama Dance Collection 2018.

Innovation: Moment Factory’s creative drive

Guillaume Bourassa – Director of R&D, Moment Factory

Guillaume Bourrassa, director of R&D at Moment Factory will illuminate how the company has been built around innovation, and detail the various mechanisms that constitute the creative engine of the studio—namely the principal research axes, the approach to R&D as well as Research and Creation, a new and promising avenue of investigation. More specifically, Guillaume will present to you the people who make R&D a reality, and the structure and processes that have been developed to initiate and evaluate experiments. Using case studies, he will illustrate how the axes of R&D and R&C foster the spirit of innovation both internally and with external clients and partners.

Overseeing R&D activities at MF, Guillaume draws on his extensive hands-on background as a maker, troubleshooter and multifaceted media hacker. As the former technical director of Montreal’s SAT, and multimedia artist under the moniker Création Ex Nihilo, Guillaume has spent over a decade immersed in Montreal’s digital art world. At Moment Factory he leverages this expertise to bring together artists and developers with the latest techniques and technologies to spark innovation and raise the bar of Moment Factory immersive experiences.

Coffee Break

Panel – Articulating the Complicated Linkage between Art and Robots

Panellists:

• Ken Goldberg, Professor at UC Berkeley
• Jean-Paul Laumond, Professor and director of CNRS-LAAR
• Bill Vorn, Professional Artist, Professor at Concordia University
• Michel De Broin, Professional artist
• Heather Knight, Asst Professor at Oregon State University
• Boris Verkhovsky, Director of Human Performance Development, Cirque du Soleil

Moderator:

Evan Ackerman (IEEE Spectrum contributing editor)

Evan Ackerman has been writing about robots for over 10 years. After co-founding his own robotics blog in 2007, he began contributing to IEEE Spectrum magazine in 2011, and he’s managed to write nearly 7,000 articles (and counting) on robotics and emerging technology. In addition to Spectrum, Evan’s work has appeared in a variety of other websites and magazines, and you may have heard him talking about robots on NPR’s Science Friday or the BBC World Service if you were listening at just the right time. Evan has an undergraduate degree in Martian geology, which he almost never gets to use, and he’d be delighted to talk to you about impact craters given half a chance.
Tracking down interesting robots has taken Evan to conferences and events on almost every continent, and he’s actively trying to work out the best way of getting himself to Antarctica. Evan currently lives in Washington DC, along with his partner and a steadily growing collection of robot vacuums. In his spare time, he enjoys scuba diving, rehabilitating injured raptors, and playing bagpipes excellently.

Lunch

Robo-Exoticism:  The Expressive Motions and Emotions of Our All Too Human Machines

Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley

Long before the word “robot” was coined in 1920, the tropes of automatons and androids in art and literature exaggerated the promises and perils of human-like machines. I propose the term “Robo-Exoticism” to characterize this pattern and how it has been amplified as tech companies jump on the AI/Singularity bandwagon. I’ll put this into the context of Expressive Motions and present examples of new work by others and my own art projects including the Tele-Actor and Ballet Mori.

Ken Goldberg is William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley. Since 1997 he has hosted over 150 presentations by artists and curators at UC Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture lecture series. His artwork has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, ICC Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and the Whitney Biennial.

How Robot Motions Influence Human Behavior

Heather Knight – Asst Professor at Oregon State University

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Dr. Heather Knight runs the CHARISMA Robotics research group at Oregon State University, which applies methods from entertainment to the development of of more effective and charismatic robots. Their research interests include minimal social robots, multi-robot/multi-human social interaction, and entertainment robots.Outside of Oregon State, Knight also runs an annual Robot Film Festival. Past honors include robot comedy on TED.com, a robot flower garden installation at the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, and a British Video Music Award for OK GO’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video, featuring a two-floor Rube Goldberg Machine. She has been named to Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science and AdWeek’s top 100 creatives. Prior to her position here, she was a postdoc at Stanford University exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces, conducted a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University exploring Expressive Motion for Low Degree of Freedom Robots, and received a M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed a sensate skin for a robot teddy bear at the MIT Media Lab. Additional past work includes robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics.

Trace of Motion

Guillaum Credoz, founder of Bits to Atoms, Professional Artist

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Guillaume Crédoz is the founder and director of Bits to Atoms, a research-creation workshop in Architecture and Design in Beirut, Lebanon. He works on opportunities at the heart of digital design and manufacturing through his creations at different scales, from buildings to objects and machines.
Rooted in the strength of a multidimensional practice, supported by a transdisciplinary technical knowledge, the office and workshops produce together solutions and proposals that find all their originality in design and manufacturing.

Interactive Session

Room 518ab

1. Single Stroke Light Painting with a Quadrotor Robot, Kejia Ren and Paul G. Kry, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. [PDF]
2. Designing a Robot Which Paints With a Human: Visual Metaphors to Convey Contingency and Artistry, Martin Cooney and Peter Berck, School of Information Technology, Halmstad University. [PDF]
3. Painting watercolour artworks with Busker Robot, Lorenzo Scalera, Stefano Seriani, Alessandro Gasparetto and Paolo Gallina, Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine, Italy. [PDF]
4. Optimization-based analysis of artistic expressive motions for robotic action art, Alexander Schubert and Katja Mombaur, Computer Engineering, Heidelberg University. [PDF]
5. Secret Lives of Machines, Ray LC, Parsons School of Design, New York, USA. [PDF]
6. Post-Printing Era Revisiting Handwriting with Writing Robots, Atsunobu Kotani and Stefanie Tellex, Department of Computer Science, Brown University. [PDF]
7. From Motions to Emotions: Exploring the Emotional Expressiveness of Robot Swarms, Mar ́ıa Santos and Magnus Egerstedt, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. [PDF]
8. Co-creative Physical Drawing Systems, Chipp Jansen and Elizabeth Sklar, Department of Informatics at Kings College London, United Kingdom. [PDF]
9. Clothes design using micro-UAVs, Ryan Cotsakis, Ying Gao, David St-Onge and Giovanni Beltrame, Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal. [PDF]
10. Excluded by the JellyFish: Robot-Group Expressive Motion, Alexandra Bacula and Heather Knight, Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA. [PDF]