Title: Artificial Life
Dates: October 8 – November 28, 1999
Dates: October 8 – November 28, 1999
Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA
Artists: Mark Bennett, Lauren Grossman, Jim Rittiman, Sandy Skoglund, Dr. Mark Tilden, Shawn Wolfe
Artists: Mark Bennett, Lauren Grossman, Jim Rittiman, Sandy Skoglund, Dr. Mark Tilden, Shawn Wolfe
Excerpt from curatorial statement:
Last Spring I saw a videotape of a Discovery Channel show called Robots Rising. I was immediately sucked in, not by the subject matter at first, but rather the unadulterated boyish displays of excitement and wonder the scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratories displayed for their creations. Dr. Mark W. Tilden is internationally recognized as the pioneer of analog robotic technology research, and he beams with pride as he watches one of his tiny solar powered insect-like robots react to environmental stimuli seemingly instinctually. The creatures are put together with simple hardware; scavenged transistor radio parts, old calculators, and discarded pagers, and are generally no larger than a paper airplane. Tilden and his team have created more than 300 robots with artificial nervous systems and electronic cores that perform basic tasks, surviving obstacles in the environment, and overcoming damage to themselves. These simple machines accomplish all this with no programming whatsoever, which makes them as close to artificial life as anything humans have created.
These robots, which were made for a scientific purpose, struck me as touchingly beautiful, delicate, obsessively detailed interactive sculpture, and the foundation was laid for my curatorial trek. With Tilden as the purely scientific cornerstone for the exhibition I began to ponder broader artificial life concepts such as religion, television and film, drugs, the witness protection program, personal memory, propaganda, dreams, time travel, chat rooms, role playing games….
These robots, which were made for a scientific purpose, struck me as touchingly beautiful, delicate, obsessively detailed interactive sculpture, and the foundation was laid for my curatorial trek. With Tilden as the purely scientific cornerstone for the exhibition I began to ponder broader artificial life concepts such as religion, television and film, drugs, the witness protection program, personal memory, propaganda, dreams, time travel, chat rooms, role playing games….
As we look toward the millennium and this age of rapidly advancing technology it is important to acknowledge that it is distinctly human to question ethical issues, issues of morality and mortality, and to ponder beauty. The creative spirit that drives scientists, architects and the like to create things that fill a need is the same creative spark that drives artistic vision. Tilden’s “living” machines stretch the boundaries of the scientific definition of life; in this exhibition, the accompanying works of art stretch the boundaries of our personal, individual conceptions about life.
