The video on Behnaz Farahi below goes into a little more detail about "The Caress of the Gaze" mentioned in the previous post, and also touches on her work as an architect. This is what reminded me how easily I can be fooled into misdiagnosing intelligent life. The Mummenschanzy juddering of "Aurora"'s reactive ceiling panels may not remind me of anything alive specifically, but they do remind me of puppets, and my brain still expects puppets to have a puppeteer. In the introduction to the second term
of Gemma Brockis' online university's History of the Kiss (which now has its own site), snogging's origin is traced back 540
million years, to the deuterostome Saccorhytus Coronarius who let its spittle drift from tiny mouth to tiny mouth in the ocean. Even if there never had been such a thing as puppets, seeing any object react to you would probably still read as a sign of Life, regardless of how little Life actually reacts to you.
Isn't it great what you can do with a 3-D printer?
Looks like we've come a long way from those dancing toys that moved whenever you made a noise in their immediate vicinity. For some reason, the detail that unsettles me the most is that electrodes are all it takes to detect your level of attention, of all things.
ReplyDeleteI wondered about that. I assume they don't know what you're paying attention to, just registering that you're paying attention to *something*, like seeing a dog's ears prick up.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen Theo Jansen's wind-powered 'strandbeests'? They definitely cross the uncanny is-it-alive barrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LewVEF2B_pM
ReplyDeleteI have, yes, thank you! Similarly, although far more clumsily, Boston Dynamic' headless leaping robo-hounds.
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