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    Bryan Cera​

    Assistant Professor in Object Making and Emergent Technologies

    Alberta University of the Arts

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    instagram.com/cera.tops

    contact bryan cera

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    As presented at TEDX Milwaukee in 2014, ARAI is programmed to carry our the "useless task" of procrastination.

    TITLE

    ARAI

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    CATEGORIES

    robotics, performance, 3d printing, creative coding, electronics

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    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.

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    External Links:

    "Making Useless Machines" TEDx talk

    Useless Machines story by Adam Ryan Morris

    Related Projects: