A Glimpse into Ultrafuturo
Part 2 of 2
In part one of this interview, I discussed the work of the Ultrafuturo Group, and the performances and film and theory the group has produced. Now in part two We discuss their involvement with MEART: The Semi-Living Artist and the influence of the Suprematists that they brought to the project.
Wes Unruh:
About MEART, which I know you were involved with, could you explain kind of what that was.. I know it was neurons in one place running a robotic arm in another place, but, what was your involvement with the project.
Boryana Rossa:
MEART was a project that was developed in SymbioticA Reseach Lab, which is the University of Western Australia, and Symbiotica is a unique lab, which is a biological lab, which is run by artists and people with artistic background but who have skills in biology and technical skills. So they initiated this project in conjunction with Potter’s lab in Georgia Tech which is a neurobiology lab. (Editor’s note: Dr. Steve Potter’s lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.) And people who are from Australia, Guy Ben Ary and Phil Gamblen, they’re the main people, but obviously it’s a very complex project that involves many many other people, like Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, artists who are at SymbioticA who participated in this. So I’ll explain the project, and then I’ll explain what we did with it. Because we came up in the middle of it, well, two years ago, and it was started seven years ago. So what it does it that it has a brain which is made out of mice neurons, and they’re grown on a petri dish which has electrodes inside of it. And these electrodes, they’re connected to an arm, the arm of the MEART, which is a mechanical arm that draws, that draws drawings. And MEART gets inspiration before we came up into the project, that draws inspiration from the portraits of the visitors of the gallery.
There was a picture taken from the visitor, and the picture was reduced to a 68 pixel black & white image. So every single pixel which was a different gradient of grey, black or white has a certain corresponding electrical potential. So this electricity was sent to the neurons and it stimulated them through these electrodes that are in the petri dish. And then after the stimulation stops, there is another flow electricity which is the output of those neurons because they make connections and all, within each other. And then they produce electricity. So they send this electricity that is transformed by software to certain impulses that move the arm, and the arm draws something. And there is another camera that takes a picture of the drawing and sends it back to the neurons as feedback. This is the same way that an artist draws pictures, like I want to draw picture of this cup, and I see it and I draw something and I look at my drawing and I think “it is not the same’ so I look at it and this cup here and I compare it until the moment when I think my drawing is as similar as possible.
WU:
So create a feedback loop for the..
BR:
Exactly, there is a feedback loop. So what we did actually.. it was a very mysterious connection that we made. Because as a scientific project, it was working more as an artistic project than a scientific project, because they were changing the “brain” every three hours and it was not stable enough in order to execute real scientific research with the neurons. And the main research of Steve Potter is to prove that the neurons are capable of .. that a handful of neurons is capable of some kind of sensible behavior, and this is his general research.
WU:
So instead of being a scientific or an artistic experiment, it was almost a philosophical experiment.
BR:
Exactly. The idea is that when it is exposed in the gallery we usually talk about the fact that those are artificial entities that we create or, we intend to create. We don’t know how conscious they will be, or maybe they will become self-sufficient in certain forms. And why do we create them. All these questions that we’ve talked about already. And what’s our responsibility to our creation. What happens if the robot dies, because the brain itself sometimes dies.
WU:
Or gets cancer.
BR:
Yeah, the whole list of things.
WU:
This also goes back to the living robot stuff. One of the things that I thought interesting in your rights for robots essay (See The Robot Revolution 1 – ed.) is that you were saying that Robot Rights right now are kind of in the same place that the ASPCA was in 1890. That at that point rights for animals was laughable. And right now, rights for robots is laughable. Yet still right now we have shows like BSG where.. um.. Do you see that this is going to become more and more of an important debate as we get further and further into the future?
BR:
Yes, I think so, and especially.. first it will become more and more important debate because we have a lot of cyborgian technologies that are applied in the army, especially in the army. Which is already a very serious ethical problem for me because to develop ‘remote-controlled war’, to me it is not more humane than to have a war with the real soldiers in real time. Because I think by being displaced from the place where you’d.. drop the bomb or something.. you feel less responsible, it’s a button but you kill real people. All this enhancements of the soldiers, that are developed. They are entangled with their brains, (This WIRED article provides just one example – ed.) they are like.. exoskeletons and all these types of things, they are made in order for them to become more superior than the soldiers of the enemy.
Also there are some experiments that are made on the soldiers.. so many, many, many things. But not only the soldiers, but we so many surveillance technologies, and different types of uh.. chips. Verichips.
I don’t want to go into just explaining all these things because you probably already know, but.. when somebody is more enhanced than the other, then there will be another ethical problem. “Why you are more enhanced and I am less enhanced, and who can afford to be enhanced and who’s not enhanced?” And being enhanced doesn’t mean that you are healthy, maybe you will die sooner. All these type of things. And also there is another thing that.. like there is this artist, and he’s a scientist/artist, he lives in Toronto, his name is Steve Mann (Steve Mann’s Web Page – ed.) He developed wearable computer, so he lives with his computer and it is already a very elegant and very tiny little thing. He wears glasses that he watches his computer screen and he can check out his emails with his glasses, he has also enhanced vision, many other things.
He said that he, in a way.. he’s very politicized.. not very, but to a certain extent.. and through his life with all this technology on him, he in a way represents the real cyborg, and how people think about him they usually have kind of hostility, and they don’t really like him, because he’s “scary”. But what happens when you need this enhancement because you are sick? Are the people going to look at you like a weirdo or something?
WU:
The Other?
BR:
The other. Yeah. So this is the first area where the discussions are going to be more and more spread out. And if we come up with already self-sufficient programs that appear somehow to be intelligent or to be weird to us, then we’ll have all these issues already widely spread.
WU:
Could you talk about the email you sent to the Vatican about robot rights, to kind of drag it into the religious and the political arena. I was curious what you said in the email?
BR:
It was about.. we want you to accept the fact that robots have souls and they have the right to be saved as any human being. Because of course the religious things, they will appear in connection with the robots too, and people are discussing this right now. (Laughs) This is something that probably has the right to vote, but it’s not going to be saved by the God, it’s not going to Heaven, we don’t know where it’s going to go.
WU:
Well that ties into the idea.. I’m fascinated by posthumanism, by transhumanism, and I know that there’s this debate about uploading consciousness into a computer. So if you upload your consciousness into a computer does your soul get lost along the way? Because you are no longer biological, you wouldn’t be. So I think that once we get to that point, which is possible, I think we are going to get to that point, there won’t be a differentiation between the artificial intelligence and the human intelligence that is in the computer, so I think that we are becoming the robot in a way.
(Boryana translates what I’ve for Oleg, and they discuss for a few moments before Boryana verifies that this is a question. Oleg relays a detailed response, then Boryana translates the following:)
Oleg Mavromatti:
There must be a distinguishment or separation or determination of how do we think about the artificial entities in the computers? Do we think about them as something more simple than human beings or do we think of them as something which is more complex? And then these two categories they will already determine how we think about our brain if it is uploaded somewhere. If we think about the body as kind of the most important, or the superior part of being human, then we’ll have problems.
BR:
I just want to be clear about our participation in the MEART project, because we came up with the idea that human portraits are not the best stimulation conceptually to give, for the the robot. So that’s why we proposed to use as stimulation the black square. Kazimir Malevich
, he was a Russian futurist and he was the Minister of culture, the Kommissar of Culture in the Bolshevik Government after the Bolshevik Revolution. And he’s one of the most important artists of all of Eastern Europe, and the bloack square is kind of a project which is uh..
(Oleg cuts in, and speaks to Boryana for a moment.)
So Oleg says that Zamyatin
WU:
They are sub-symbolic image, or sub-symbolic element..
BR:
Yes, it can be called like this, but also if you think about the pixel.. I’m over-simplifying it, but if think about the pixel or the dot as something that moves in the space then this movement already it creates 3-d shape. Like we are made out of dots.
WU:
So this is the very base.
BR:
The very base and also everything. The absolute zero and absolute I don’t know what. Both zero and minus zero. So that’s why, he was also futurist and he was also thinking a lot about the machines, and the artificially created entities. And that’s why we were thinking that MEART as the being it can be, it should be inspired by this philosophy, or by this image as a primer image, compared to everything else. And Malevich was talking about creativity, in a way he was saying that imitating nature, like when we make a picture of the nature, we’ve made dead pictures, because we just imitate the nature that we see, we don’t create the nature itself. And he thinks that the real creativity that a human is capable of, it has to be a picture or an object or something that doesn’t exist in nature. And that’s why he came up with the black square.
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