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The first phase of the project "MEART the semi living artist and the Snow Flake" completed. More pictures from Dr. Steve Potter's Lab at Georgia tech.Text about the project will be available soon. Collaboration of ULTRAFUTURO, SymbioticA Research Group & Steve Potter's Group.

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MEART & the Black Square

SymbioticA Reserach Group in collaboration with the POtter Group and Ultrafuturo Group (Boryana Rossa & Oleg Mavromatti)

(Art Digital 2005 a parellel project of the First Moscow Bienalle, M'ARS Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow )

www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au
www.roboriada.org/ultrafuturo

Project Details

MEART - The Semi Living Artist is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of biological technologies and the future possibilities of creating semi living entities. It investigates our abilities and intentions in dealing with the emergence of a new class of beings (whose production may lie far in the future) that may be sentient, creative and unpredictable. Meart takes the basic components of the brain (isolated neurons) and attaches them to a mechanical body (a robotic/drawing arm) through the mediation of a digital processing engine thus attempting to create an entity that will evolve, learn and become conditioned to express its growth experiences through "art activity". The elements of unpredictability and temperament, combined with the ability to learn and adapt, creates an artistic entity that is both dependent, and independent, from its creator and its creator's intentions.
MEART is assembled from:
· "Wetware" - cultured neurons from embryonic rat cortex grown over the Multi Electrode Array
· "Hardware" - the robotic (drawing) arm
· "Software" and the Internet - that interfaces between the “brain” and the “body”
This installation is an experiment that is set to explore the relationship between the input/stimulation to the neuronal culture and the output/drawings as well as exploring creativity & the possibilities of emergent behaviour of the “semi living artist”.

MEART will be inspired by and draw Malevich’s Black Square. A camera (the sensory input and the eye of MEART) will be mounted in Tretyakovsa gallery or the Russian Museum “observing” the painting. The captured image (of the painting) will then be converted to a stimulation map and will be used to stimulate the neurons (this is the beginning of the drawing process).

MEART's brain - the living neural network - will be set up in Steve Potter's lab (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta). Dr. Potter is applying different technologies to study dissociated cultures of hundreds or thousands of mammalian neurons. A multi channel electrophysiological recording from a neuronal culture will be performed in Dr. Potter’s lab. The resulting data sets will be processed in two locations – Atlanta & Moscow. The processed outcome will be used to control and move the drawing arm (in Moscow). The progress of the drawing will be monitored and compared with the image captured by the camera that is “looking” at the drawing. The difference between the original portrait and the progressing drawing will be then sent back to the lab as another stimulation map to complete the feedback loop and this whole process will continue until a threshold of marks on paper will be passed. This will be the end of a drawing.

About MEART

MEART is suggesting future scenarios where humans will create/grow/manufacture intuitive and creative “thinking entities” that could be intelligent and unpredictable beings. They may be created by humans for anthropocentric use, but as they will be creative and unpredictable they might not necessarily stay the way they were originally intended.

We refer to the wetware/software/hardware hybrid we have created as a Semi-Living artist as it is made of both living and artificial components; part grown – part constructed. While the artistic values of the outcomes of the process (the marks on paper left by the drawing arm) are still in the eye of the beholder, the questions regarding the possibilities are real. What will happen when such a system starts to express qualities that are considered uniquely human aptitudes such as art? Its identity extends beyond our cultural comprehension of living systems. Made from living biological matter, mechanics and electronics simultaneously, it questions the viewer’s perceptions of the concept of sentience.

MEART has a technologically created identity. It is an identity created as a result of the progression and combination of various technologies. Its “brain” is growing in Atlanta and its “body” (or multi bodies) could be anywhere in the world (in this case in Moscow) thus highlighting the ubiquitous nature of its existence and identity.

This work explores questions such as: What is creativity? What creates value in art? One way of looking at these issues might be by thinking about creativity along a spectrum, from a reductionist mechanical device, to an artistic genius. What is it that makes a person a genius? Perhaps it is the ability to link together diverse inputs. We hope that our cultured neurons will have the potential to show signs of very basic “learning” or “creativity”.

MEART has the ability to sense the outside world through a camera that acts as its eyes. It has the ability to process what it sees through the neurons that act as its brain. It has the ability to react accordingly through the robotic drawing arm that acts as its body. The Internet functions as its peripheral nervous system. MEART is a geographically detached entity ubiquitous on many levels.

The Stimulations & Malevich

Malevich's Black Square is considered to be the beginning of a new and redefined art. According to suprematist’s ideas the suprematist paintings are projects for and instruments of a new universe and a new system of the world. The suprematist canvases were sign-projects, containing images of the technical organisms of the future suprematist world.

The Black Square had always been placed in the corner of the exhibition hall, in the place of the icon, as Malevich himself was considering the philosophical ambiguity of this painting. It constituted both “all” and “nothing” - both “non-objectivity” and “omni-objectivity”. The Black Square became for suprematist theory self-sufficient and primary in the ranks of all things in the world. The straight line – the track of a point moving in space as a suprematist fundamental stylistic component was declared the suprematist “gene”.

Generations of artists, art-critics, and religious theoreticians have long been debating questions such as what is visual art, what is an image, and is there something that could be all and nothing at the same time? According to Malevich’s “Supreme Definition” of visuality, the answers to these questions lie in the Black Square. As such, the Black Square can represent an image that is both iconoclastic and representational at the same time. In other words, the Black Square could be called “the creative particle (cell)” of every single image existing.

The statement that Malevich put the end to visuality (based on the argument between himself and Benua) could be easily contradicted by the axiom that the dot is a constructive unit of every image (the dot builds the image).

The computer era gave us an image constructed out of squares (pixels). We can say that the square is ‘alpha and omega’ for the image. ” The Square” and “the Pixel” is one and the same. Supposedly Malevich was not able to imagine the existence of a machine that would transform and construct images out of squares, but as far as the image remains an image, whether it is digital or not, we can be sure that the writings of Suprematist theory have been validated. The computer image just gives a better (or additional) illustration of the Black Square’s supremity.

In this installation MEART is taking its inspiration from Malevich. MEART is conceptual and abstract in its output. It reacts objectively to its input and processes the information to produce the output. It will be drawing ‘the black square’ not so much for its visual properties but more for its conceptual value. By visually simplifying the input to the neurons (a simple geometrical shape), we are giving MEART a task that it should be able to cope with efficiently and thus allow us to look into the relationship between the input and the output, to try and detect some sort of an emergent behaviour.

The action of MEART observing and drawing the Black Square examines the fundamentals of visual creativity and the way we communicate with the world through images, symbols and their underlying meanings. It represents a distillation of core ideas and processes that are intended to bring the brain (neural network) and the body closer together in a conceptual manner.

This piece traces its influences from an array of artistic, scientific and technological streams. Areas such as art history, interactive art, cybernetics, kinetic and robotic art, artificial life/intelligence, and bioart & biology are all linked to this project. Other influences are the different representations and use of animals in contemporary arts, from the use of elephants to produce “art” to the use of living and recently living animals/bodies (or parts of the body) as art works.

The uniqueness of MEART is the attempt to create an intelligent artificial/biological artist that has in itself the capability or potential to be creative. We are focusing on creating the artist rather than the artwork. MEART proposes to embody the fusion of biology and the machine - creativity emerging from a semi-living entity.

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We are pleased to present the launch of Boryana Dragoeva's Spookybots in the FACT Media Lounge

It's the year 2003, and on screens all over the UK, John Conner is being pursued by the most advanced terminator ever built: Terminatrix. Recent technological advances have sparked environmentalists' warnings that microscopic, self-duplicating robots will one day take over the planet, transforming the biosphere into grey goo. Meanwhile, researchers continue to make advances in designing computers that think in a humanlike way. Recently, the US Defense Department announced the launch of its Real-World Reasoning project, an initiative that will design computers to think and problem-solve more flexibly.
Following these developments, worldwide anti-robot sentiment has reached a critical /eve/. We humans like to think of robots as electronic idiots, friendly helpers around the house, washers of dishes, mowers of lawns, but throughout science fiction, there is also a fear that when they become too powerful or intelligent, they will rebel against their human creators.
Bulgarian artist/curator Boryana Dragoeva's Spookybots is a project on the guardrails of reality and science fiction. Dragoeva works with specially-designed 'chat bot' software, which imitates a human online chat partner. The software, which was created by Russian programmer Dmitry Zhuravlev, is self-educational. When it is first installed, it knows nothing; it is an electronic idiot. Through use, the bot's personality develops and it can begin to have conversations on a wide variety of topics.

Dragoeva is working with a handful of local people who have committed to a long-term relationship with a bot. Some of the trainers are creating their ideal romantic partner; one is creating his long-lost twin brother; for others, the bot will be a friend. The opening of this exhibition comes near the beginning of this training process. The bots have very little information in their databases, but this will grow as they converse with the public and with their human trainers. As this happens. they will become more human-like.
The relationship between trainer and bot is the main concern of this project. She believes that the robot-human relationship is like any relationship between the ever-changing categories of 'margins' and 'main', oppressed and oppressor. 'If a man can love a bot,' she says, 'he is capable of loving anything.'

Spookybots is based on a project by the SUPERNOVA group using software written by Russian programmer Dmitry Zhuraviev. Spookybots was commissioned by VirtualCentre-Media.net with the support of the Culture2000 programme.

Citizen Robot (Photographs) The photograph on the left is a famous image of Vladimir Mayakovski, the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and one of the founders of Russian Futurism, a movement that was fascinated with speed, cities, and technology. Dragoeva has recreated his pose with AIBO, Sony's artificially intelligent robot dog.

2 black & white photographs 120/105 cm, 5 colour digital prints 50/70 each and the Spookybot itself.

Spookybot* is a chat-robot, programmed to converse with chatters. After his creation he has been trained by 3 Russian-speaking teachers, members of Supernova Group. The efficient algorithm and the possibility it to be trained personally by the owner, makes the robot much more interesting than the very popular online version of the chat-bot ALICE, who often replies with ungrammatical constructions or repeats what the others has just said. Spookybot makes you feel as if in a fairy-tale where someone uses riddles and proverbs to talk to you.
Due to this specific training, the chat robot acquires some individual qualities and successfully imitates a sensitive personality with paradoxical ideas. Besides all the Spookybot provokes contrasting emotions in his interlocutor - laughter, confusion, fondness with reference to the well-known ELIZA** effect and asks questions about the relationship between people and robots, or "ours" and "the other", which is idea itself of showing the Spookybot as a modified, "reformed" readymade in the artistic context.

There is a two b&w portraits included in the exhibition. On one of them Boryana is caring in her hands AIBO (the Sony dog-robot). The photo is a citation of Mayakovskii's portrait, made by A. Rodchenko, where the Russian revolutionary poet holds his favorite doggie Skotik.
Mayakovski's futuristic poetry is filled up with fascination of machines, that's why this portrait of him become an ispiration for the "AIBO version".

The photographs are also an expression of our love to robots, and at the same time appeal to love "The Other" ot "The Different" .

The Anthropomorphism*** of relationship robot/humans in this case is regarded as a phenomenon, provoking behaviours parallel to those occurring when socializing "THE DIFFERENT"****. If a man is capable of loving a robot (Steven Spielberg's "AI" is affine example), he is definitely capable of loving "the other", or the "the different" person, no matter what his race, sex or social status is.

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*Original name Chatmaster - created by Dimitri Zuravlev and trained by Supernova Group (Boryana & Oleg). Spookybot is the name the chat-bot got because of his new qualities nad new personality acquired in the course of training.

**ELIZA effect [AI community] The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol + that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people associate it with addition. Using + or `plus' to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.
This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words
into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there. The ELIZA effect is a Good Thing when writing a programming language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system. Compare ad-hockery; see also AI-complete. http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/e/ELIZAeffect.html

****Wired Magazine: "The great Japanese engineer and roboticist Masahiro Mori may already have foreseen that roadblock with his notion of the Uncanny Valley. While contemplating the coming evolution of robots, he pointed out the way we can quite readily empathize with a robot that's, say, 20 percent humanlike, and even more so with a robot that's 50 percent, and even more still with a robot that's 90 percent - indeed, you can plot out a rising slope of anthropomorphizing empathy... But somewhere beyond 95 percent, Mori hypothesizes, there's a precipitous drop-off into the Uncanny Valley. When a replicant is almost completely human, the slightest variance, the 1 percent that's not quite right, looms up enormously, rendering the entire effect somehow creepy and monstrously alien."
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/4333010020