Small-world robotic systems
Title:
Organiser/Presenter(s):
Statement:
The world we live in is a consequence of the great acceleration caused by technological advances, in which the human presence reconfigures the globe from the agency’s perspective. From the complexity perspective, the agency reveals its strength in transforming systems from the bottom up. Acquiring this perspective is also understanding life’s fundamentals that create communities, societies, countries, nations, and ecosystems. However, due to the emergence of invisible and powerful communications networks, the notion that we are all physically connected has lost its place in virtual existence. In this virtuality, although extremely strong, the power of agency is somehow lost to the individual that encloses themselves within bubbles of self-referential information, obscuring everyday actions’ ability.
The workshop will generate an interactive art installation from individual structures of physical computing connected. The participants will develop separate pieces and should be focused on simple rules of sense-computation-actuation. Those pieces will be connected to a unique microcontroller board (previously produced by one of the organizers*) capable of transmitting information from one-to-four other boards by cable. The choice of technology is deliberately intended to demonstrate how physical presence and complexity emerge from an individual agency.
A selected and limited electronic material should be previously presented to participants, and this limitation is critical to invoking creativity within the notion of an agent in the perspective of sensing, computing, and acting. Within the community of individuals, these limitations create one first order of emergency, a first order of magnitude, that reveals the existence of a primary organized collective: the community. The focus on demonstrating the community is intrinsically related to the physical presence; as humans, we tend to understand this concept as such. Decentralization is another crucial concept to be revealed within the workshop experience once individuals are only responsible to sense-compute-act within information obtained from their neighbours, and no structure will be coordinating the system from outside the community.
Although this perspective may be understood within the concept of flock behaviour, we won’t focus on movement coordination. As such, we are looking for this workshop to co-produce a community with participants using the concept of automaton cellular. Using this approach, the agency will become a material to be developed by participants within the idea of relational autonomy. Where acting in the community means being aware of other individuals within your proximity.
Another critical approach is that by using automaton cellular, we expect people to engage in non-traditional design within the robotics concept. While robots are usually seen as complex individual structures, we want to reveal the robotic sense as an assemblage. The individuals are comprehended as individuals but have a simple sense-computation-action design, and the assemblage is a complex robotic structure.
This workshop aims to awaken people to the knowledge of agency in physically connected structures and two orders of magnitude: individual and community (assemblage). The main impact is on producing knowledge about how physical interactions reveal the power of individual agency and the complexity of emergencies.
