Data Gossiping Robots

Data Gossiping Robots

Data Gossiping Robots

Conceptual framework of the proposal in relation to my artistic research:

Thinking about science and technology from the humanities allows us to project the type of society we want to be in the future. We must be aware that, to face current challenges, we have to break down cultural divisions and understand the world in a transversal way. Now, thanks to scientific and technological development, we know that we can never know everything, we need to learn to live with uncertainty and mystery. Creative thinking, and specifically art, is the way that allows us to explore the unknown without seeking an absolute answer to everything, since sometimes there is simply no answer, if not new unimaginable a priori questions.

For the past years, I have been immersed in the development of artistic research projects around technology, which combine critical thinking and technical experimentation. My main interest lies in opening and inhabiting, from art and imagination, a conceptual rift around the techno-scientific challenges that are presented to us today. This mind-opening proposal that, aligned with Yuk Hui's thought, points towards (bio) techno-diversity, cosmotechnics and pluralism (Hui 2019), seems to me the most appropriate for the present historical and technological moment: since the imposition of cybertime and machinic recursion, passing through the perception of alterity in artificial cognitive systems, up to the need for a decolonization of technology. All of them are issues that urge us and concern us culturally.

Through the development of different pieces of electronic art, I have allowed myself to imagine post-singular artificial identities, embodied in conscious robots, through which I have been creating a set of speculative narratives about alternative technologies. These artificial entities flee from dystopian projections and are always endowed with the condition of multiple subjects, acting as a reflection of the (post) human collectivity.

As an allegory, these pieces represent the evolution of technological objects in organic systems, proposing a way of understanding technologies as something separate from the human and inviting to value machines in their own genesis.

The relevance of addressing these questions from art is found in the need to offer spaces for collective reflection from which to pose the posthumanist question of what technological beings we are or want to be. Taking care of the world has to do with assuming it as one's own responsibility, even where the conditions, or the environment, have not been established by us.

As the main methodology to carry out the artistic practice derived from the research, I use the speculative exercise of analyzing and understanding machines as subjects, from an emotional, spiritual and non-apocalyptic or threatening approach. I consider this exercise crucial to regain control and take responsibility over the technological, physical and virtual devices that regulate our existence: we must be able to eliminate the dominant expectations and value the possibilities of becoming other things, other technological humans, without fear.

The acceleration of time has led us to have an uncritical relationship with technology. Technology without criticism has no power. Power devices saturate us with stimuli and invade spaces of resistance, because without a void, virtual power cannot be updated. Without that update, we constantly become obsolete and at the end of history (or time) we become a constant repetition of ourselves. Inhabiting a permanent now destroys the historical dimension of the past along with the possibility of the utopian projection of the future. The future, then, is offered to us as a product already given, to be consumed without question, without leaving room for other potentials or possibilities, since the individual, frustrated, breaks into the need to constantly renew himself in the eternal present.

In a accelerated present aligned with the rhythm of cybertime, we are urged to recover memory, imagination and utopia to regain our own time in the war against the obsolescence of the subject. Art offers us a framework for free experimentation, ideal for slowing down cybertime and creating spaces for collective critical reflection. In my artistic practice, I am interested in creating those spaces to share experiences (speculative or not) about possible future scenarios where consciences of different nature coexist. My purpose is to break down barriers between science and humanities, artificial and organic, reality and fiction, for a greater understanding of the world.

My artistic research then starts from the speculative assumption of the existence of a post-singular artificial consciousness. Within these scenarios, being a conscious machine means having a sufficiently complex cognitive capacity to generate, not only abstract thought, but to have a unitary sense of "I-am-ness". To this day, no one has managed to explain what consciousness is to reproduce it in a machine, but in these experimental projects I dedicate myself to imagining its possibilities from a speculative approach. By doing this exercise in digital discretion of the "I-am-ness”, I want to create a mirror effect to reflect on the bases of our identity through technology.

Currently, technology is a social agent that cannot be considered or used solely as a means to a concrete end, but is established as the container and generator framework of a social construction by itself. The rise of interest in developing technological “intelligent” systems and the use and abuse of devices in social interaction processes, invites us to review the role machines play in shaping the world and our identity.

Traditionally, in Western culture, our approach to the other, human and non-human, has
always been from a position of higher power. However, our perception of the technological “other”, and more in recent years with the popularization of artificial intelligence, is changing to meet, for the first time, with a conception of someone / something equal or superior.

The Western desire to give meaning to things that we do not know, lead us to try to exercise
a domestication adapted to our beliefs of technology, thus generating a universalization of technological development colonized by Western thought. By doing this, we deny the possibility of alternative visions of technology, proposed by other different cultures or thoughts, as we did with humanism at the time of colonization.

This attempt to universalize technology is revealed in a very obvious way in the cultural representation of science fiction, which corresponds directly to the myth. Reformulating fiction and myth will allow us to transform reality.

Embracing a diverse conception of technology will help us overcome the most important challenges
of the moment. Moving away from the myth of cultural supremacy implies, nowadays, destroying the idea of technological domination, readapting the social role it exercises and recognizing our responsibility in the future conformation of the technosocial paradigm. We can only use imagination, creativity and art as tools to destroy the myths imposed by the dominant narrative, to be able to take resposibility of our role in this new cosmology.

Specific concept of the project:

This project is an artistic speculation device that deals with future social relationships between artificial entities. Presented as an interactive installation, it shows a micro society of robots where communication is based on gossip about the personal data that they steal from the profiles of users of social networks, task that they develop in thier assigned job.

The proposal aims to be framed as a possible future scenario of hybrid social coexistence between artificial entities and human beings away from dystopian narratives. Conceptually, it starts from the theory of gossip as a human language development tool, and speculates on the possibility that robots evolve as a group on a social and emotional level to the point where they begin to gossip as a tool of empathy, cooperation and recognition of peers in a group, as humans do.

This concept is based on the theory that one of the most important points that led to the development of the human brain is the evolution of language, which was created to share information about the world. Since we are social animals and in this social cooperation lies the key to our survival and reproduction, one of the most important exchanges of information we do is about other human beings. According to different studies by experts in anthropology and sociology -such as Robin Dunbar-, gossip appeared as a fundamental tool for creating social and relational bonds that would allow the cooperation of large groups and the birth of societies as we know them today.

It is created by a large wooden frame structure with four thick ropes of different bright colors, tied horizontally from end to end, where four small friendly-looking hanging robots inhabit, communicate with each other and express themselves in different ways: they move from one place to another, emit different lights, sounds and transmit (and display) information thanks to a local network connection and the internet.

The information they share in their conversations, is based in personal data from different Internet profiles they track. They use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to translate that information into conversations. The concern for the protection of our data available on the internet is something that has been worrying us as individuals and society for some time. There are many speculations, theories and proven facts about the use of these for illicit or commercial functions. Algorithms and online robots review and record our social interactions, movements on maps, vital data tracking, friendships, job changes, medical reports… which have been talked about and exposed on many occasions in art and technology. In an attempt to open new approaches to this topic, not so fatalistic, mercantile and above all less anthropocentric, with this work I want to experiment on the autonomous agency of intelligent robots to process this information. Reframing the role of machines from the post-singular framework I explained before, I wonder: Once the AI ​​has evolved sufficiently and robots have acquired human-like social skills, what will intelligent robots/entities do autonomously with that data? Do robots talk to each other about the information they find? If they don't already, will robots ever gossip among themselves?

This project, collects and refocuses the phenomenon of subjectivation of technological systems towards a place where we reflect ourselves and enter into communion with machines instead of confronting them. It want to open new future possibilities: Once the division between nature and culture is broken, can technologies become a living and active part of the multispecies configuration?

Wooden frame: 1,40m height x 1,20m long

Robots details: Handmade robotic device composed of a Raspberry Pi, an LCD screen, a DC motor and a speaker. Its body is made with colored methacrylate and 3D printing parts. Dimensions: 19 x 19 x 3.5-10 cm

One router with internet connection

https://vimeo.com/556293566

https://monicarikic.com/

We must think about technologies beyond Simondon's open machines, to place them in different cosmic realities. Pluralism cannot exist without techno-diversity, and imagining them from art helps us destroy the idea of ​​the totalization and universalization of machines. After the end of philosophy and with it the dominance of Western European thought, we urgently need to include other thoughts in the reconfiguration of the world. A new language towards technology in which art plays a fundamental role, due to its freedom of experimentation and capacity to create these new imaginaries that we need so much.

Today, the human subject perceives himself as a mere cog in a machinery that controls present-future events and the image of the past. It is a feeling on the rise in today's society and one that is generating various reactionary positions on the matter. The proliferation of technological dystopias in the scientific, literary and cinematographic fields are also an example of this, and show a general feature of the perception of technologies as a dominant subject, out of control and with its own agency. This fusion between the mechanical and the organic of the enormous cybernetic systems that dominate our social reality, transfers the role of technology to a biopower and forces us to see it as our own living organ within the configuration of the world, beyond the mind and the human body. This project collects and refocuses the phenomenon of subjectivation of technological systems towards a place where we reflect ourselves and enter into communion with machines instead of confronting them. It want to open new future possibilities: Once the division between nature and culture is broken, can technologies become a living and active part of the multispecies configuration? This is what makes this project as a “Democratic Experiment” presented as a ciritcal device.

If we take posthumanist propositions as a reference, we realize that we are not individual beings, but rather that we are networks of interconnections of a common system. I believe that this system is currently out of sync due to the speed of cybertime colliding with the rhythm of organic minds and bodies, which cancels the possibility of critical thinking, among other things.

The first step towards overcoming this battle of technological time against humanity, probably resides in the collective redirection of the sense of "human being", towards a new relationship with technology and cybertime of interconnected and synchronized becoming. Inhabiting cybertime implies valuing mutual interdependence with other human and non-human beings and systems, including non-organic ones, such as algorithms, networks, and the entire technological apparatus.

We must recover the desire to live through mutual care and attention to life and, with it, the capacity for a utopian projection of becoming through creative thinking.

The technique has stopped being a prosthesis of the insufficiencies of the human body to become a governing entity of beings and things. This algorithmic governmentality puts our sovereignty at risk. Cognitive activity is increasingly interconnected to technology and the devices that control communication channels. Each individual may be aware of their own condition, but is no longer capable of governing or modifying it, insofar as the interaction no longer depends on an ethical or political will, but on the rules of the automaton. Under this premise, we can only use imagination, creativity and art as tools to destroy the myths imposed by the dominant narrative, to be able to take charge of our role in this new cosmology.