Machines and Robots
With LEGO's new concept of constructible toy robots, the unexpected commercial success of Sony's dog, and that of TV programs featuring various types of human/machine combat, like Robotica (U.S.) and Junkyard Wars (U.K.), one notes that the idea of the domestic robot - faithful mirror and obedient companion of its human creator - is making a big comeback in the collective imagination. The robotic android, a sci-fi icon since the 1930s (brought to the screen by Fritz Lang in Metropolis), seems to have given way to more abstract and fluid representations - cybernetics being the science of navigation - of artificial life and intelligence, as in computer-brain Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Yet, today's machines differ from this conception of the android, a kind of human double mimicking its creator's strengths and weaknesses. The artists' installations broached later in this article stage robots and machines, invented or thwarted from their initial purpose, to bring out a machinic phylum, or the genesis of the machine, a "new anthropotechnical biotope," to borrow from science-fiction writer Maurice Dantec.
Many top-ranking artists, sculptors, and electroacousticians have distinguished themselves in the rather fertile culture of "recyclart" in Quebec since the 1980s. One can't help noting that certain experiments in kinetic and audio art already expressed a human/machine relationship that went beyond the myth of the human being's absolute control over his instrument to underscore more complex relationships, ranging from confrontation to complicity through sensuality. Martin Tétreault's tortured song of vinyl recordings reconstituted on mutant turntables, the mechanical and symbolic violence of Istvan Kantor 3 (Office furniture machinery 1993-2000), the robot installations of Bill Vorn 4 and Louis-Philippe Demers 5, or the poetry of Pier Lefèvre's sculpture/instrument inventions: all these opened the way for a reflection, not on the human being on the one hand and on his tools on the other, but on the symbiotic universe emerging from the human/machine exchange.
Working with various metallic, electronic, and mechanical materials and scraps, this motley crew of artists and experimenters worked the machine as if to reconstitute a creature they rearranged from disparate parts, both analogue and digital, given a new life, either far-removed from their primary function or as interpretation of their initial vocation. Audio, visual, and machine language is already revealed through a power relationship with the human being (artist/performer or spectator).
Whether thwarted or invented, hobbled or bad-tempered, various art machines and robots saw the light of day and began to populate venues and events in Montreal: ISEA in 1995, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the FCMM 6 in 1998, art galleries, like Oboro in 1999, Festival Elektra and La Biennale de Montréal in 2000. Many Quebecois artists - Louis-Philippe Demers, Bill Vorn, Istvan Kantor, [The User], among others - distinguished themselves in creating and staging works that articulated mechanical, electronic, and analogue languages.
One also observes young arts showing increasing interest for an art based on robotics and artificial intelligence. Last spring, a hundred multimedia graduates from Montreal's four major universities participated in PROMO 4.0, an exhibition that took place at the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT: Technological Art Society). The event illustrated the resurgence of installations that questioned the status and nature of the machine and of networks, interpreting the way in which machines have saturated our environment. The PROMO press release stated: "Clearly, the work leads us beyond the 'interactive multimedia' object, a product whose creators have already programmed the avenues one can explore. For the students, it was a question of broaching artificial intelligence by taking the neural network as a model."
These installations reassess the latent power relationship between humans and machines, creating a hybrid system in which human beings momentarily become tools for operating the machine. This confrontation theme also lies at the centre of Quebec artist Louis-Philippe Demers' most recent robotics installations, inaugurated in August 2001 at the first edition of F.E.R (Festival d'Expériences Robotiques) in Frameries, Belgium.
Organized by Montreal artists Julie Méalin and Louis-Philippe Demers on the site of an old coal mine that Jean Nouvel converted into a "scientific adventure park," the F.E.R. presented robotics installations that disrupted the sci-fi myth of the machine/android. The exhibited installations focused less on the transformation of raw material than on assembling components to confront the spectator with the machine's pretenses at mimicking life.
L'Assemblée
Demers' L'Assemblée is monumental, to say the least, filling a space with about sixty kinetic, audio and luminous robots that encircle the visitor, who warily enters the space as an intruder, an insect approaching a spider web. Here, the installation acts like a kind of trap, closing in on the spectator who finds himself plunged in a machine universe having its own logic and language. Only physical interaction through the visitor's motion and gestures as he is called upon to "perform" the piece allows for the "assembly" to come to life. The strange gathering of robots takes on the appearance of a court, where the last human being faces a majority of machines; he must decipher their language using the only leverage available to him in a rather conflictual communication - his physical presence.
The reflection underlying L'Assemblée is a critique of the positivist equation of progress with technological expansion. L'Assemblée seems to echo the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, in 1962, described "quasi-objects" through the example of an exotic observer judging car traffic in a big city centre: "It is no longer a question of an agent's acting on an inert object, nor of a reverse action by an object, promoted to the rank of agent, on a subject who would selflessly dispossess himself for its benefit, that is, situations bearing a certain dose of passivity on one side or the other: beings together confront each other as objects and as subjects at the same time." 7
This crowd of robots reinterprets various human grouping scenarios - fair, circus, freak show, political assembly - and attempts to express the growing autonomy of the machine. It recalls Michel Serres' reflection on the genesis of "things": "In all the languages of Europe, in the North as in the South, the word thing, in whatever form it is given, has its origin or root in the word cause, derived from the judiciary, the political, or the critical in general. As if the objects themselves only existed by way of debates in assembly or by the decision of a jury. […] As if the only human reality came from the courts alone. […] The court stages the identity of the cause and of the thing, of the word and of the object, or of the substitutive passage between one and the other. A thing emerges there." 8
In Demers' L'Assemblée, it is the human being who appears to be judged by an assembly of "things;" they may be debating his existence, perhaps even his survival. The last human being (the installation's optional subtitle) tries to comprehend the robots' language - logos - in a machine environment that intentionally distances itself as much as possible from human behaviour.
Twelve dot matrix printers, metaphors for modern working environments, "offices," are played by an orchestra composed of a dozen networked desktop computers. As [The User] explain: "The orchestra is 'conducted' by a network server, which reads from a composed 'score.' Each of the printers plays from a different 'part' comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII text files to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music." Thus, ASCII texts are used as commands for the various printer movements and as a tool for composing and synchronizing a very textured music that appears to resonate from the bowls of the machine.
In this installation, far from being modelled on the human being, his needs and requirements, what [The User] proposes is a seemingly autonomous society of machines that respect a certain hierarchy (the conductor-server and the network-orchestra), are freed of their primary functions, and freely express themselves in a language quite distinct from human language, as it is a question of ASCII codes. The spectator penetrates this apparently familiar universe to discover that he is in fact an intruder, a stranger. The computer (and its peripherals) is seen as a topology in the making, a species having its own genesis and development through human assistance, an autonomous environment and mode of communication.
Conclusion
These installations reformulate and reassess an opinion that is now widely held and that was articulated once already in the 1930s by a technical theoretician in the field of urban planning and architecture: Lewis Mumford 10. He saw in the Machine a kind of reasoning being, an external power that threatened to impose its laws on human beings, "a kind of monstrous adversary is springing up from the field of human activity by a blind whim of the forces of Destiny."
Art sociologist Pierre Francastel analyzed the mysticism-tinted representation of the machine in the 1960s; this representation remained "faithful to the idea that human history is always the discovery of a great secret, the machine era thus corresponding to the process of analyzing some previously ignored notions, like Space, Time, Movement, and to the development of a kind of universe of automatons charged first with alleviating and then with replacing human work. […] However, this hypostatization of the technical, artificially isolated from the context of contemporary activity, risks putting into the humanity's hands new gods just as murderous as the old. One may fear that the era myths still flourishes." 11
While they assess the aesthetic experience of technology through the relationship of artwork to context, subject to object, contemporary artists are now endeavouring to interpret the myth of the machine, the modern counterpart to the Rabbi of Prague's Golem 12.
