ecopolis

Carnivorous art, man-animal-machine hybrids, mechanical drawing machines, subliminal installations, pole dancing robots, light sculptures and cybernetics are just some of the exhibits to be found at Kinetica Art Fair, the UK’s first art fair dedicated to kinetic, robotic, sound, light and time-based art which opens in London on Friday 27 February.

Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.

More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.

The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.

Today robotics shows an extraordinary growth and inside the UE it is considered strategic. In a few years robots will be indispensable to our society, raising social, ethical and legal problems (we handled this topic in the D’Ars magazine issue dedicated to the “third life”, the life of the entities and beings created by the human culture). Hence many artists all over the world focused their work on the robotics’ evolution – indeed a variety of disciplines – and its challenges.

The XXV Oscar Signorini Prize, created in 1984 in memory of the D’Ars magazine founder to support young artists (under 35), in 2008 was devoted to robotic art, for the first time in Italy. In the past the Prize often disclosed the new art forms in my country: for instance, in 1998 it was dedicated to net art and in 2005 to bioart. But robotic art and its challenges have a unique relevance here because they stand at the roots of the D’Ars magazine, since among the magazine’s founders there was Silvio Ceccato, who contributed to introduce the cybernetics in Italy and published some articles in this magazine’s early issues (a memory of Ceccato and his education, written by Pino Parini who was one of his collaborators, is published in the D’Ars pages concerning the Prize). So robotic art almost naturally originates from a continuity between the past and the future.

This year the jurors’ task in nominating the young artists working in the robotic field wasn’t easy. Maybe it depended on the reason the necessary interdisciplinary theorethical, technical and technological skills in order to operate with excellence in this realm require a path which is longer than in other artistic forms.

This difficulty heightens when we refer to Italy: no italian young artist was nominated by the jurors, even if the Jury had a majority of italian members. In Italy in the robotics field exist excellent and internationally renowned schools (the author of one of the three selected projects is a PhD student in Italy); Italy hosted the First International Symposium on Roboethics (in 2004) and is among the first european nations in the industrial robotics field. But differently from other nations, opportunities, structures and maybe also cultural openness for a concrete collaboration between technoscientific and artistic skills are needed in Italy. I hope the XXV Oscar Signorini Prize can give a contribution and a powerful boost in this direction.

The projects selected by the Jury I had the honour to chair (whose members were Eduardo Kac, Luigi Pagliarini, Pavel Smetana, Laura Sansavini, Franco Torriani and Riccardo Notte) shows a rich international survey, ranging from traditional robotics to robotics-biology relations, from augmented reality to kinetic art, from man-machine and environment-machine interaction to social robotics.

All the projects were very compelling for topics involved, artistic dimension, vision… In the end the Jury had to select the first three ones, and among them the winner.

The selected projects are:

1) Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot, by Garnet Hertz (Canada) – winner
[http://conceptlab.com/roachbot/]
The most complete and best-accomplished project, dealing with a provocative interpretation of the relations between robotics and biology.

2) The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, by Haakon Faste (USA)
[htttp://www.haakonfaste.com]
A project with a very rich and challenging theoretical structure, and with an original vision about robotics.

3) EX-SE-08, by Shih Chieh Huang (Taiwan)
[http://messymix.com/]
A project with a striking dimension, with a great ambient insight and the idea of a “popular” robotics.

by Pier Luigi Capucci

On Thursday, 20th November, 2008, the stage will be set at the baroque Palazzo Birago for an artistic performance combining art and technology. The Orchestra Meccanica Marinetti (Marinetti Mechanical Orchestra) by the artist Angelo Comino – Motor in art - has been specially chosen by the Chamber of Commerce of Torino and Piemonte Share to launch the initiative Action Sharing. The orchestra consists of robot drummers that play steel drums “live”, under the direction of a performer. Having literally built the city of Turin, the movement and work of factories will be on show, translated into the interactive digital languages of the contemporary world. Paying tribute to the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the orchestra builds an ideal bridge between Turin’s industrial past and the city’s current transformation into a city of knowledge.

Two robot drummers. Two steel drums. One human performer. Mechatronics and music. The repetitiveness of industrial production becomes a gesture of music. A project in which the past of the Italian avant-garde returns in all its contemporaneity to seal a new relationship between humans and machines. Orchestra Meccanica Marinetti is a project conceived by Angelo Comino aka Motor, who gives life to enlightening inspirations that were unrealizable in Marinetti’s day.

Kubic’s Cube by Francisco Lopez at Gogbot Festival in Enschede.
Kubic is a two and a half meter long aluminium robot that hangs from a ceiling, and moves according to the construction of its limbs as it performs to the music and sounds of the artist.

Kubic’s Cube is a performative Installation with Kubic acting as a dance-machine, a cubist kinetic sculpture and an instrument of rhythmic movement.

Kubic hangs in the space surrounded by sounds of a jungle, and illuminated by a video projector. The public moves freely in space and regards the robot from different perspectives. Pablo Ventura has programmed a choreography in which static positions and coincidental movement patterns produce the illusion that the robot is alive.

and more photos at flickr ecopolis_NOW.

Yesterday night great performance by Mu-ziq at Atack.
Besides this msuical events i post here a video of the musical installation of Eric Groen.

Some photos of the exhibition at Medialab Enschede with Bill Spinhoven, Stepehn Rothwell, Stelarc, Saxion, Marieke Verbiesen, Der Wexel and Christian Zwanikken.
Personally i really appreciate the pieces of this artists, that reanimate the dead parts of animals trough kinetic machines.
Here some photos of these pieces:

Kees de Groot talking with some local people.

The steampunk coffee bar.

Jaromil explaining with cyberpunk matter today.

BIELEFELD, Germany. Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU) and the newly founded Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) at Bielefeld University, signed a landmark cooperative agreement. Bielefeld University is one of Europe’s leading establishments in the field of cognition

As part of the collaboration, Honda has provided two ASIMOs to the CoR-Lab, equipped with “whole body movement” software developed at HRI-EU. Using an interdisciplinary approach which integrates the natural, engineering and social sciences, researchers will apply an understanding of how the brain works, its underlying architecture and mechanisms, to develop intelligent systems with similar capabilities. As part of the agreement, Honda is contributing support for the CoR-Lab’s graduate school to educate up to 15 PhD. students and young scientists in joint research projects. It is the first time that a European university will have access to ASIMO as a research platform.

ASIMO is the culmination of more than two decades of humanoid robotics research and development by Honda engineers which aimed to successfully replicate human movement, such as walking and climbing stairs. This was achieved in the 1990s; the latest generation of ASIMO goes even further with advanced mobility. Honda’s ultimate ambition however, remains to develop a robot so advanced that it can genuinely help people, such as those who lack full mobility, or by working in environments too dangerous for humans.

The Humanoid

An Italian production (though some unofficial sources suggest the movie as being an Italian/Tukish co-production).
Year of production was 1979. The movie was passed by the Italian ratings board on March 21st of that year, followed by a theatrical release in Italy on April 11. Italian company Merope Film was credited with the film’s production. It was their fourth and, to date, last cinematic entry ( copyright holder: Merope Film S.r.l MCMLXXIX ).
Other companies involved in the production included Studio 4 and Studio Verzini, who handled the optical effects, Cinesicurta (insurance), D’Angelo (Draperies), Minotaur Photoplay (dialogue recording), Fono Roma (Sound re-recording), GP 11 Safas Cantina (costumes) and Pompei (shoes). Rancati provided the arms, and Rocchetti e Carboni the wigs.
Roma’s Press Photo handled the stills photography. Ennio Morricone’s masterful score was recorded and published on the RCA S.p.a label.

http://www.golobthehumanoid.com/filmmenu.html