SYDNEY: An audience waited in suspense to be wowed by a new-age interactive robot, only to find that it falls victim to stage fright.
Tuesday night at the University of Technology Sydney, art and technology aficionados came face-to-face with the Articulated Head, a recent creation of Australian performance artist Stelarc.
In a keynote address at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, Stelarc introduced the Articulated Head as his latest project exploring body-machine interactions. Immediately following, the crowd migrated across campus for a meet-and-greet with the machine - an interactive robot consisting of an LCD screen mounted on a mechanical arm.
Pioneer of cyborg art
Introduced as the "Australian pioneer of cyborg art," Stelarc is renowned for performances in which he suspends himself by hooks through his skin, manoeuvres robots that simulate insect locomotion or gives up voluntary control of part of his body to a remote manipulator.
He holds a number of positions and titles including Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the MARCS Lab at the University of Western Sydney, and Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In his lecture, entitled 'Alternate interfaces, embodied agents and machine couplings: Constructing chimeric architectures', Stelarc provided an overview of his past performances, and offered a glimpse into the interface between and merging of technology and the body.
The age of circulating flesh
"This is an age of blurring of bodies, an age of circulating flesh," he said. "The skin is no longer a connection between internal and external, or between the natural and the artificial."
Stelarc has been exploring the body-machine relationship with his Articulated Head project for the last four years. The head, appearing on an LCD screen, interacts with users with the help of cameras, speakers, a six degrees-of-freedom mechanical arm and computer interface.
Currently, the Articulated Head has no voice recognition capabilities, but will respond in a deep, digital voice to questions typed into its computer.
