COLLISION:technomorph

Raising Gearwareness

By Raising Gearwareness

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To the loose confederacy of MIT gadgeteers that is the COLLISIONcollective, machines can seem alive, like pets or obnoxious family members. They're ever-present companions who need constant attention and care, and have individual quirks that, when you spend enough time around them, begin to seem a lot like moods and personalities. Baby-talking dog owners and particularly avid gardeners do the same thing with their inanimate companions of choice -- see human consciousness where there isn't any.

The curators of the collective's show at Axiom are calling their tendency to humanize machines "technomorphism," and using it to lump together a collection of their work over the past few years into a retrospective show. Some of the pieces are stretching it. Daniel Paluska's The Holy Toaster, which burns an image of Jesus onto pieces of Wonder Bread, really isn't blurring the lines between human and machine. Sometimes toast is just toast, savior or no savior, and reading too much existential meaning into that cheap (and awesome) trick gets onerous.

On the other hand, Andrew Neumann's Quartet really does prompt a long, lingering look at consciousness. A simple, compact wood-mounted mechanism equipped four small LCD screens, Quartet is perhaps the saddest, most contemplative little robot you'll ever meet. (See me technomorphizing?) The screens, which aren't difficult to think of as enormous, limpid Bambi eyes, are displaying feeds from four tiny video cameras trained at the machine's own parts, which are moving in an analog feedback loop. As the screens gently move back and forth, it watches itself, but only you, not it, can see what it sees, which makes you the piece that closes the loop; the piece that makes it "aware." "We actually function as a surrogate consciousness for the machine," says William Trembley, one of the show's curators.

The other pieces aren't as tragic, but some are as unsettlingly sentient. John Slepian's Caged is a wooden box sealed by wire mesh, a breathing, yipping Frankenstein of odd elbows and patchy hair interacts with you. It's not anywhere near human, but it clearly "wants" something anyway. Eric Gunther's Organ Organ invites you into a loop, but does so by being cuddly, not demanding -- at least until you accept the invitation. And jackbackrack's Follow the Leader, an AI program that simulates the social dynamics of leading and following, lets you watch as the myriad personalities within it go about their business so convincingly that you forget that it's all a pathetic fallacy.

COLLISION:technomorph

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