As presented at TEDX Milwaukee in 2014, ARAI is programmed to carry our the "useless task" of procrastination.
TITLE
ARAI
CATEGORIES
robotics, performance, 3d printing, creative coding, electronics
DESCRIPTION
ARAI (Arm Robot for Artistic Inquiry) is a vertical-articulated six-degrees-of-freedom industrial-style robotic arm, whose soul purpose is to procrastinate.
We live in a culture where performance is always a requisite (job performance, scholastic performance, athletic performance, sexual performance, social performance...) and robots are performance machines. We design apparatuses to out-perform, to perform for and, in some cases, to perform humans.
Historian Stephen Kern wrote in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, technologies of mechanization inspired entirely "new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space," transforming "essential structures of human experience and basic forms of human expression."
Today, in a culture where we immerse ourselves in technologies that think and move for us, how might our modes of thinking and our structures of experience continue to shift? By the introduction of a performance machine programmed to act out the “useless” tasks we reserve for humans - wandering, daydreaming, procrastinating and playing – we are asked to rethink the technologies we construct and reflect on how they construct us.
Related Projects:
