Inkblot
Of related interest is the short essay Crayons or computers?.
Inkblot Projections (2002-3) is a permanent installation at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco that explores the phenomenon of subjective vision.
Users range through five inkblots, for each of which they can play back five separate (and marvelously inventive) stories by five different people of different ages and walks of life. To see this in action, see sequence excerpt.
The physical design was by Amanda Parkes.
Artist’s statement:
Often we say we have an idea, but sometimes it seems just the opposite: that our idea has us. And when it does, it blocks us from having any other.
Nowhere is this clearer than when we look at the chaos of an inkblot.
Suddenly from its meaningless (but bi-symmetrical) smudges we make out a picture of something quite definite: perhaps a face, or a body, or a landscape.
What’s odd is that once we’ve seen such a picture, we have a hard time seeing anything else – including the different pictures that other people say they see there. Inkblot Projections makes that seeing easier, letting us take leave of ourselves for a moment to glimpse things through other people’s eyes.
This artwork should not be confused with the famous but disputed Rorschach test, which purports to allow psychologists to read people’s personalities by analyzing and scoring their responses to a set of secret inkblots.
It turns out that our imaginations are not so easily pinned down.
Kids in Motion
Kids in Motion (2000-1) is a project that encourages children to think with their whole bodies. They create dance phrases from movements of their own invention as well as from those they program into the Lego Mindstorms robots that they design. From the interaction of these two elements arises a new kind of choreography and curriculum. Originally implemented at MAK Frankfurt (with Museum director James Bradburne), it was supported by JP Morgan Chase and its curriculum distributed in New York City and abroad (available here.) This resulted in several performances by children, including one at the Children’s Olympics in Athens. See Frankfurt rehearsal and Athens performance clips.
Artist’s statement:
The key idea behind this work is that we think not just with our heads, but with our whole bodies. Our intelligence comes not only from our mastery of logic, but also from the physical and emotional interactions we have with the world and with each other.
For this project, we have not been teaching dance to the children, but rather learning with them what dance can become. Thus, we haven’t instructed them in ballet techniques, for example, but rather encouraged them to explore the full range of ordinary movements (walking, running, turning, jumping), and then let them invent new movements of their own.
The same approach worked well in constructing the MindStorms Lego robots. Here again we weren’t teaching computer science to the children, but rather allowing them to discover it as they invented new ways for the robots to move.
Of course, constructing and programming a robot is in fact of matter of pure physics and logic, but a curious thing happens when you put these robots onto a dance stage with the children. Suddenly you start seeing the robots’ expressive qualities emerge. They start to seem like characters. Since they’re considerably smaller than the children, they perhaps seem like their pets: but rambunctious pets, not perfectly obedient ones.
When the children are dancing and interacting with the robots, what they’re really exploring is our future: for our future will involve ever more complex interactions between software and people.
What better place to explore that interaction than on the dance stage?
