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Machine Wilderness Symposium
Amsterdam, Artis, 20151102
(notes)
Machine Wilderness: new ecosystems where environment & technology co-exist, in which humans are less central
Theun Karelse
- ISEA 2012 (Andrea Polli) - Ron Horvath in the 1960 (cultural geographer) - wrote about machines in a negative way: machines are dumb, wilderness is a mess. this event - more positive approach
- design from an environment - machine not easy to distinguish from its environment, integrated
Augmented ecology augmented ecology.com @augmentedeco: 1. how to transform GPS tags on animals to make much richer meanings (Microsoft: Technology for nature - individuals and groups; facebook for herds, anchor point for drones - hybrid ecology)
- danger - cyberpoaching - panna-211 (panna tiger in a reserve in india), don’t share photos from safaris, poachers can track the animals
- gps tags → epizoic media (libraries of signatures)
- harvesting fields → harvesting data
- IOT → internet of organisms and ecosystems
2. Ecological Robotics
- Daan van Dijk Darpa 2013, COTSBot (management of invasive starfish), Robird (management - scares birds away from Schiphol), TumbleWeed bot (based on plant movement - drifts, blows through the desert and collects environmental data), SwarmFarming (using robots for agriculture)
- Biocarbon engineering 0 planting 1mil trees per year using robotic drones
- Rainforest connect - conservation using 2nd hand phones - they listen for the sound of chainsaws, and report - monitoring
- MyBionicBird
- Compostable Drones - how do we deal with lifespan of tech in landscapes
- AI: mind (thinking machines) + bodies (acting machines) + environment = behaviour
Designing
- starting from processes in the environment, beyond objects,
- starting from local habitats
- diverse knowledge systems
Designing towards cohabitation & intimacy
![Theun's introduction to Machine Wilderness Theun's introduction to Machine Wilderness](https://live.staticflickr.com/5623/22102467244_6250c00cd1_b.jpg)
Erik de Jong
Prof at the UVA & Artis
“Natura Artis Magistra” (1838) - Nature is the teacher of art & science (Royal Zoological Society); → What does it mean for the future to connect art, science, nature…
- e.g. exhibition of microbes & micro-organisms
- Het Groote Museum first museum in NL (1852) - in the future, a museum, a workplace for the antropocene (started in 1600 - colonialism, 1900 - industrialisation…), for man and nature, platform for discussion & exchange; where do we stand as humans on the earth; galleries on nature, science and technology, biomimicry, the future (cyborgs, replacements of nature…); laboratory nature - nature managed by man (manipulating genetics, etc.)
- E. Wilson “the artificial new environment into which technology has catapulted humanity” - what does this mean? (e.g. natural disasters, infrastructure failures (New York blackout in the storm in 2012))
- wilderness = 1st nature, cultural landscape (agriculture) - 2nd nature, designed nature (gardens, urban environments) - 3rd nature
- Louis le Roy, Turn off nature / turn on nature (1973) - not dominating but co-operating with nature - still dualistic thinking - machine ↔ nature
- we need a new language to describe interactions between machines and environments
- the etymology of the word machine = “device”, “instruments”, “apparatus”, “machine a habiter”…
- “wilderness” = “community of life untrammeled by man where man himself is a visitor, not to remain” - this changes in the antropocene
- city as metabolism - a new relationship between town and landscape - hybrid landscapes - deserted industrial locations, landfill reclamation…
- avoid confusions with pre-modern and mechanistic views
- finding a way to talk about hybrids, co-operation between technology and nature - a common vitality in reclaiming aesthetics as a process and not an object in the tangle of tech and nature - including philosophy, ethics, morals - responsibility of human nature towards non human nature
Petran Kockelkoren
Technological Disclosure of Landscapes
How technologies opened up our experience of landscapes?
- Nature is thought to be a healing experience, while cities and technologies are thought of as being alienating - inherited from the romantic era (??)
- “Nature and memory”. The term “landscape” is originally dutch - the landcape painters of the Golden Age; usually without any technology (even thought the Dutch landcape was riddled with technology), “Nature as sublime” (19th ct.), “Technology is alienating” - loss of nature (Heidegger, etc.), 21st ct - the dualism begins to change - technology can re-connect humans to nature
- 19th ct - transport technology (train, etc.) - a revolution of how we experienced landscapes;
- “railway spine” - cultural pathology resulting from incorporation of technology - health claims related to train journeys; problem for insurance companies - learning to cope with the phenomenon of speed and technology which hasn’t been integrated into daily life; 19th ct - hysteria, 20th ct. alien abductions, multiple personality disorders - symptoms are real, causes uncertain
- fairground attraction - simulation of a train/boat experience, fair ground as exercise ground, immersive simulation, to learn to cope with the experience of speed - landscapes moving - things nearby flash by fast, further away things move slower - you have to change the way you perceive things around you - people are unsettled
- Victor Hugo - description of his train journeys “flowers are no longer flowers but colourful streaks…”
- Futurists - depicting speed and velocity, buildings start to dance, people flashing by, 'streaks - signs of speed'
- 20ct - car, monument to a car race - it alienated people from the central, static perspective, not so much from landscape
- Ballard - attempting to change perspective and coin new imaginaries for speed - we needed to re-normalise our senses - images and sounds help us cope with the new experiences…
- pop-art - streaks in comics - speeding cars
- zootrope - suggesting movement, children’s toys, artistic expression, scientific simulation of birds in flight (Max Ernst) - disclosing the world by means of technology changes our perception and sensory experience
- Muybridge - horses galloping - are they ever free from the ground (yes)
- Stereoscope - photograph with two different focus points - the world available in stereo - photographers began experimenting with focal points (depth, 'enhanced stereos' - issue with veracity); Bishop - if God wanted us to see this depth, he would have given us eyes further apart…; Scientific photo of the moon - very difficult (distance, etc.), but there is a wobble in the moon (the photos were taken 3 weeks apart) - “a step out of and beyond nature” - but it disclosed the possibility to view the moon much more intimately - a mediated view of nature, with a more intimate and immersive knowledge - a breakthrough in the view of technology
- Tintin - “destination Moon” - actual rockets and clothing inspired by Herge’ comic; project Tintin insterstellar nanosat mission to alpha centauri - Alan Bean (astronaut) - “the only artist who has been to the moon”, painting with moon-dust
- Andrea Polli (tracking data of hurricane Bob → “Atmospheric Weatherworks” acoustic artwork to understand nature on its own terms, complex rhythms and melodies of nature on human scale) & Gavin Starks (translated data from telescope images into sounds - soothing synth sounds - a deception; but the image itself is mediated already (radiowaves translated into image)) discussion at DEAF 2004 - we are always embedded in cultural and historical incorporations of technology - nature is always a mediated event
- Husserl “an experience of nature is always artificial” - documentaries - mediated, staged, interpreted events
- Esther Polak - GPS traces through the city “Amsterdam Real Time” (2002) - the mediated event - sky-drawing, “Milk”, fishing boats - different stories emerge than when we look at photographs - new positioning of artists in the field, just breaking ground
- 3D projections in cinemas, art galleries - contemporary fairgrounds to exercise new perceptions
Anouk Visser & Reinier Kop
Creating Technology for nature conservation, in game reserves and agricultural mapping, Dutch UAS
- primarily drones
- motivation:
- rhino poaching, the anti-poaching drones need to be cheap and simple for the rangers to use
- game counting (compulsory)
- elevation/photographic maps and 3D models
- where to:
- object detection/recognition - reduces time needed to go through the images, towards 100% accuracy
- AI counting tool - automatic reporting of current states and changes over time
- expand to other sensors (multispectral/thermal) for precision agriculture and crop monitoring
- Earth Observation Platform - gathering analysing and visualisation of data - for any environment
- “surveillance company for nature” - military algorithms not open sourced
Xavier San Giorgi
Relationships between technology and food forestry
Reading technology or reading nature?
- Food forest - farming like the forest - perennial plants, complete diet farmed all year around, systems approach - design science from a holistic perspective; robotics can help with monitoring of feedback loops
- more biodiversity, more biomass, more yield, more lushness
- low maintenance system
- Layers of the forest (overstory, understory, shrubs, herbs, ground-cover, root, climber
- biodiversity - including plants, animals, insects, microbes… - in an equilibrium; if not - more work!
- healthy soil (springiness of forest soil)
- Too often we design agricultural spaces in order to adapt to machinery we use
- Yeoman’s Keyline Scale of permanence (change effort - energy / relative permanence - time)
- Food forests exist more in tropical/subtropical gardens
- How do you design a food forest for a city scape? In recreation areas, plants that aren’t commercially viable, that are difficult to harvest industrially
Tech requirements:
- touch earth lightly
- broaden our senses, be aware it shapes the way we behave
- help ppl reconnect to nature
- be amazed with and learn about the environment, give it meaning
- not a substitution, it’s always more layered - to design more complex agricultures
Paul Roncke
- Deep Longing to own a piece of land
- Urban agriculture is not going to solve the food problem, but it points to a DIY approach - hands, heart & head, food (consumption), playfulness, fantasy (arcadia)
- Relationship between food and landscape
- Olmsted, Frederick Law - landscape architecture (19th ct), Ian McHarg (1970s) - “Design with nature” (1967) (water ecological system of great complexity & ritual)
- dutch way of making land - engineers, farmers, politicians, NOT landscape architects
Landscape Machines
- complex systems including the landscape and technology - yes we intervene, but the ecosystem responds to it with more vividness
- post doomsday landscapes
- “Venice in the desert”, icebergs cooling cities…
- “beautiful landscapes, small scale, green (garden) / “sublime landscapes” grand, red, giant, phatasmagoric… (landscape)
- technology in a landscape - should be sublime - regeneration, over-access of power - energetic vision of landscapes (usually without human beings…)
- (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature” schroeder)
- fluctuating results, hidden technology, embodied experience - with “Fremdkörper” in the centre (the ecological body has to work harder to process) - in a constant dynamic environment - continuous adaptation
- flexible/responsive morphology - designers introduce fremdkörper, the ecosystem responds - is this co-evolution or manipulation?
- Karim van Wonderen + Sophia Molpheta “De Zeeuwse Tong Project” - “ont-poldering” - nature + agriculture - “saline landscapes”, transition between sea and the land, more biodiversity + more fish yield
Spela Petric
Reified Nature / Natured Technology
in projects like & Miserable Machines, Voyager 140 AU (2013) - metabolic algorithm in interaction with the environment; PSX consultancy 2014, sex toys for plants; Skotopoiesis (2015) confronting the vegetal otherness - how we comprehend the environment, biosemiosis; Naval Gazing
Naval Gazing (is navel gazing)
- test facility seaweed centre on Tessel
- nutrients from the Rhine can sustain substantial primary production in the north sea - could it be converted in seaweed biomass? - growing brown seaweed in the winter - it can clean up the ocean, useful in cosmetics… in springtime other organisms would take over… a theory at this point
- how to make a sea garden? a system where humans and nature co-exist
- BUT: it isn’t easy to cultivate seaweed in the north sea… - the north sea is a very hostile environment…
- Rachel Carson “The sea around us” (1951) - cybernetics and ecosystems - interconnectedness of things
- Harvesting the sea - started in the romantic period
- Knowing more about strange environments - also allows to exploit it better (for entertainment, extraction…)
- Inspirations: Strandbeest (Theo Janssens) and others
- Habiton - Man-made future habitat moved by the wind - it tumbles through the ocean and collects organisms/biomass, eventually it sinks to the bottom; human made object appropriated by nature
Miserable Machines
- Differences between technology and living organisms -
- “Soot-o-mat” Mussel muscle - ultimate sacrifice of living tissue for the production of 'excess' - soot-o-mat
- Hybridity is a slippery slope - sometimes things should be respected for what they are rather than being forced to 'hybridise'
![Machine Wilderness in Artis, Amsterdam Machine Wilderness in Artis, Amsterdam](https://live.staticflickr.com/5679/22725273385_6973dc6d3a_b.jpg)
Kenzo
Attention, movement of water and air in and around the body
Guszti Eiben
Evolving robotic ecosystems - nature inspired robotics/computer science (evolution as inspiration - influences language)
Takeaway messages
1. Artificial evolution is real, not an emulation of a 'real' evolution, just another form (Darwin evolution, Watson & Crick DNA, Turning & Von Neumann - creating evolution (computers) - programmers set the rules)
- link between evolution (biology) & problem solving (engineering): individuals (in a biological framework), natural selection (choosing fitness), reproduction (digital sex)
- evolutionary algorithm (evaluation-selection-variation loop)
- it can solve hard problems, cope with changes and deliver original solutions
- Macroscopic view (after Dennett): if you have variation, heredity and selection you must get evolution. Variation - push towards novelty, selection - push towards quality
Historical context
- (19-20 ct) Wetware (biosphere, we can observe what has happened in the past and present, in vivo)
- (20-21 ct) Software (evolutionary computing, a generative concept, in silico)
- (21ct) Hardware (evolution of things, in materio)
2. Robots can be evolved
- not all humanoid, not all mechatronics (soft robotics)
- evolution can create intelligence → artificial evolution can create artificial intelligence
- intelligence and embodiment: environment + body + mind → behaviour (AI in 20ct. narrow view of only the mind - chess, in now body + mind (and hopefully also environment) - football
- Genotypes (variation - mutation & crossover) & phenotypes (selection) - can be done in robotics too
- behaviour can evolve in robot populations - we know how to evolve software brains, how to evolve physical bodies → modules/cells or 3d printer (artificial womb)
- ethical dimension - this can get out of hand… (e.g. radiation hazard, biohazard → robohazard?) - do we need a “kill switch”; we probably don’t want distributed birthing robots, but a centralised birth clinic, with strict control…
- challenge: simulations don’t scale up very well
- Cambridge: mother robot that produces 'a child' consisting of active and passive parts, that can move on its own
- application: breeding farm for service robots or pets, entertainment (robotic parcs…); robot colonies for terraforming or ultra deep mining
- science: “cyclotron for evolution”, understanding life, evolution of body & brain, robosphere
Ivan Henriques
Hybrid forms: JAP, PNBM, SM: wet & dry machines
- interspecimen communication
- environmental robotics
- workshop on symbiotic systems, using Amstelpark as a medium, exploring the needs and opportunities of biorobotic systems (abiotic systems - solar, temp, wind, water + biotic systems (plants, animals, bacteria); creating systems to enter a dialogue with the environment - integrated interdependent systems
- energy systems
Judith van der Elst
Forest bathing - digital technologies for the enhancement of sensory experience
- understanding human spatial intelligence; mapping how native american indians relate to the landscape - our technological system tends to be too flat; flow, relationships, in-between spaces
- embodied research - what would an embodied education look like, making use of ubiquitous computing related to landscape?
- extending the bodies with digital technologies; how can they help us improve our senses?
- understanding processes in the semiosphere
- exploration in Amstelpark + University of Urbino - birdsong (sonotopes) connected to scents of landscapes + how do smells and sounds interact
- plants smell different when transplanted from their natural environment to a cultivated environment (e.g. a park) - exploring non human languages in the semiosphere (workshop in the spring)
Field robotics
Discussion lead by Theun Karelse
- experimentation in landscapes: how do you connect to it, how do we explore it
- make an experiment starting from that landscape to create a robotic entity
- borrowed scenery: asian gardening technique - including the landscape that isn’t a part of the garden
- first experiment in a small village in cornwall connected to five different landscapes - the landscapes change quite quickly (industrial, forest, coast)
- how can you connect mind+body+environment - how would the robotic species develop in different environments
- the goal is to have an exercise in designing environmental robots with the objective to understand how technology can be more subtle towards our landscapes - creativity?
- borrowed landscape - also an english invention - landscape outside separated by a fence, so the wild animals cannot enter; a robotic creature - should do something else respond to a range of different environments
- how do the machines/robots perceive/experience the different landscapes?
- begin with observing and mapping (on cards) - what you see (treetops, soil, sky…), actions (migrating, decomposing…), textures (crunchy, sticky, slimy, fluffy)
- how does the robot live in this system, how does it interact and die?
- beyond functionality and utilitarianism; starting point: it has no purpose; the systems exist for their own purpose → to exist for some time, it’s a stakeholder in the environment, so it wants the environment to keep existing.
- defined capabilities - the cards could be a way to explore capabilities of the hypothetic machines; SICS experiment in expression of emotion through facial recognition with masks on people’s faces to understand what the computer might see; try to have the participants explore the environment with limitations and capabilities of hypothetic machines
- how could the humans explore the environment the way a limited machine/robot might do it? e.g. immersion, distractions, bodily/sensory constraints - even before the robot exists, you try to experience what it might be like for that being to exist
- What would the creatures respond to their habitat? What would they feed on? Where would they exist (in the earth, in the sky…)
- Beyond mimicry of existing biological movement - different set of responses (heat, humidity…) - what kind of patterns would the robots make?
- What vulnerabilities could they have? Can robots be suicidal? Can you have survival without purpose? What is survival from the POV of the robot - self-preservation, learning from the environment, dissolution into the environment? Is there reproduction?
- The experiment should include the robot AND the habitat - and how they might change through their interactions?
- How does the robot learn (procedures)? (design question) How can you make a system which is autonomous for as long as possible?
- Longer timeframes (Gerrit van Bakel - machines that slowly walk in the landscape), something happens once in 20 years, or so fast/ so slowly that it isn’t humanly perceptible. making links to things that technologies aren’t usually designed to do
- The imaginary dimension - people will make stories about it, at which point can you say whether it works or not?
- How will the robot have/experience a sense of agency and meaning?
- Machines that are sensitive and sensible
- How are the humans involved, if at all? How do the robots affect or interact with them?
- Define what you mean by co-habitation, participation, interaction…
- Can the robot help to overcome deficiencies in the landscape? How does it contribute to the landscape?
- How to avoid negative effects? Watch out not to introduce an invasive species which puts too much strain into the habitat?
- It must be pinpointed and defined what the goal is. The question is to rephrase the role of robotics as part of a much larger discussion of the role of humans and technologies in the landscape. Very important to make this clear before starting to work.
- You could make machines that can sense one thing and do one thing, then experiment.
- You might have a community of small robots that behave like one organism, instead of one big one; the simpler the robot individuals, the easier it might be to adapt to the environment
- How can the robots become a part of a larger living landscape? A whole range of processes happen - cultural, cultivated, wild, industrial, rural, tidal, cyclical… but everything is also always a part of a larger whole
- How do you treat the whole landscape as a robotic entity?
- Do you want to intervene in the entropy that is a part of that landscape or do you want to intervene and change it?
- What kinds of questions do we ask in the design process of an artificial organism that would co-exist in a landscape… a design science that starts from something that is as complex and changing as an ecological habitat? What is that process like? What the robot actually ends up doing is secondary
- connecting with other intelligencies in the landscape; collect information from plants, animals, pollution, air… (analogy of 'smart cities' that collect information from humans); how might plants and animals react to pollution, for example?
- the landscape might need technology so that humans might be more aware; to find out what has been hidden from our view (long timeframes, different layers and rhythms)
- look at ritual behaviour across different species
- how distinct do you want the robots to be from the environment? what do you want to find out from the environment? how will you introduce it into the environment?
- robots to redevelop landscapes after disasters? terraforming
- it isn’t so obvious to understand what is missing from our landscapes (e.g. missing elephants in EU forests; indigenous farming in America - to Europeans it looked like wilderness)
- First: find out how you as a person connect with a landscape; feeling the sweat and pain of the landscape (observe, then interact)
![Theun Karelse with FoAM's guerilla grafted apples Theun Karelse with FoAM's guerilla grafted apples](https://live.staticflickr.com/5814/22104394983_bcf2fc4cd1_b.jpg)