Category: Education

DATE – 2015
DISCIPLINE – Education
MEDIUM – Installation and kinetic art
WEBLINKS
http://v2.nl/events/hacking-event
A two day event in collaboration with the minor ‘Hacking’ of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Plus an opening night. Wind and wrestling and dancing robots!
APRIL 17-18 2015
18:00 TO 18:00
Location: V2_ Institute For The Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam And Worm

Paint the Wind Using the Wind vs Sumo Wrestling and Dancing Robot Competition is an event featuring the best projects from the Willem de Kooning Academy Hacking Department course. The 2nd year students have constructed artworks that took the concept of ‘painting the wind using the wind’ in many directions. Expect the V2_ Groundfloor to look and feel like a windy beach…
Opening: 17 April, 18:00h
Opening times 18 April: 12:00 – 18:00h
On the 18th of April there will be a robot building workshop and competition by the studentes. The assignment is to build Dancing Robots and Sumo Wrestling Robots.
A Sumo Wrestling Robot and Dancing Robot event will take place at WORM (just around the corner of V2_) from 13:00 to 16:00h on 18 April. Afterwards the robots will be on display at V2.

The event features works by:

• Jurriaan Boerman
• Barbra Boers
• Esther Brakel
• Meike Brand
• Benita Brouwer
• Kotryna Buruckaite
• Aylin Buyruk
• Jade  Cadogan
• Phillp Ficozzi
• Steven van der Gaarden
• Lynette van der Giessen
• Brian Groenhorst
• Chanelle Hool
• Josien kamp
• Fay Klaassen
• Sanneke Kleingeld
• Follkert Koelewijn
• Leendert van der Meer
• Aylin Buyruk
• Annebel de Kok
• Max Kowalski
• Elise Marcus
• Marish van Meurs
• Barbra Monster
• Dorinda Oosterhout
• Nicole Pashchenko
• Corne Schep
• Rachelle Joy Slingerland
• Michiel Tollig
• Carlijn Veld
• Jordi Verbaan
• Menno Visser
• Corlieske Visser
• Mickey Vissers
• Alexandra Smorenberg

 

Teachers:

• Graham Smith
• Rob Dielissen
• Simon de Bakker
• Suzzanne Rademaker

DATE – 2015
DISCIPLINE – Education
MEDIUM – Robotic sculpture
STATUS_ Displayed at the Vitenfabrieken in Sandnes Norway
WEBLINKS
http://iolab.no/nb/nyheter/moby-jr-til-vitenfabrikken

A series of workshops to teach children how to build Sumo Wrestling and dancing robots.

DATE – 2013
DISCIPLINE – Education
PROJECT
MEDIUM
STATUS
WEBLINKS

Fukushima Café is are a series of open public events around the world which address the issue of the March 11th, 2011 nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan which is currently in the news regarding the facilities nuclear pollution of the Pacific Ocean and the imminent danger of a nuclear disaster by a possible “nuclear fuel pool fire” which can break out any time if human error or another earthquake makes the situation worse.
The Café helps visualize the scale of the disaster and seeks to collect information about what is happening at the nuclear facility in Japan to make it accessible to the public and to actively disseminate this information further. Another goal of the events is to activate a “pollination” process to help in a best case scenario to generate ideas (or approaches) on how to solve the problem and to create new connections between worried citizens, scientists and politicians concerned about the issue in order to cut through the “sarcophagus of silence” that seems to have been placed over the subject by the mainstream media.

DATE – 2005
DISCIPLINE – Education
MEDIUM – Telepresence display systems
WEBLINKS
http://www.ict-edu.nl/archief/canada-echoes-project-2005/

A project to link Dutch and Canadian schools to discuss the effects of WW11 on both cultures.

DATE – 2003
DISCIPLINE – Education
MEDIUM – Installation and kinetic art
WEBLINKS
http://connected.waag.org/sentient.html

Each Wednesday from 1 October until 26 November 2003, the Sentient Creatures Lectures were held in the Theatrum Anatomicum of Waag Society. In this lecture series, Waag Society presented speakers with an international reputation in the field of robotics, conciousness and communication. The complete programme as it was published can be found here.

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Graham Smith – November, 26
In the last lecture of the series, Graham Smith, host of the lecture series, spoke about his recent robotic invention Pebbles, that enables ill children to be virtually present in the classroom, and the role new media may be playing in the evolution of new technological life forms.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/grahamsmith.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Joe Davis – November, 19
Mr. Davis lecture was about his recent work with Cyborg sculptures and dna based artworks.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/joedavis.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Kit Gallaway and Sherrie Rabinowitz – November, 12
Ms. Rabinowitz and Mr. Gallaway lecture was about their 25 years of experimentation using communications technology and the implications for the internet generation of artists.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/gallaway.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Jaron Lanier – November, 5
Mr. Lanier talked about his new project called Phenotropic Computing, in which pattern recognition is used as a way of connecting components of software systems.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/jaronlanier.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Catherine Richards – October, 29
Catherine Richards lecture was about concepts of Post Humanism and the role this theory will play in determining our relationship to intelligent machines.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/richards.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Dick Bierman – October, 22
Prof. Bierman talked about the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This project aims at understanding the unexplained correlations between global attention like what happened on Sept. 11 and the behavior of material sensors.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/bierman.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Theo Jansen – October, 15
The artist Theo Jansen uses simple materials to give birth to wind powered beach creatures. Plastic pipe and air become ‘organic intelligence’. He lets his huge skeletons walk on the beach. This lecture was partly in Dutch.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/jansen.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Rupert Sheldrake – October, 8
Dr. Sheldrake’s lecture was about the way the mind extends beyond the brain, as described in his new book “The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind” (2003). He discussed the implications of a field theory of the mind for sentient creatures, natural and artificial.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/sheldrake.mov

Sentient Creatures lectures series: Norman White – October, 1
White talked about his award winning sculpture The Helpless Robot, which asks for your help as soon as you come near it. White meant this machine to be able to assess and predict human behavior. It was built from plywood, angle iron, proximity sensors, a modified 80386 computer, and custom electronics. The result is a robot that speaks French, Spanish and English. Its synthetic voice invites people to move it as they like. White made the robot between 1987 and 1996.
http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/norman.mov

DATE – 2000
DISCIPLINE – Education
MEDIUM – Fish controlled robotic sculpture
STATUS – 6 students from the Royal Acadamie of Art in Stockholm, Sweden

A project to build a fish controlled robotic fish tank.

 

DATE – 1993-1995
DISCIPLINE Education

THE BULLETIN, University of Toronto, December 13, 1993

Art for Technology’s Sake – If the medium is the message and the artist is the letter carrier in the Virtual Reality Artist Access Program.
By David Todd

Fred trundles along the carpet, trailing his electronic vocal cord. The evenings addition of electronic traffic, and open house organized regularly by the McLuhan program in culture and technology is in full swing and all eyes are corrected for work. A remote-controlled robot 20 cm in height with a small video camera mounted atop a wheelbase, Fred is navigating through a series of miniature art installations known as the Toronto cyber city as the robot explorers the Lilliputian and surroundings his TVR transmits images along the videoconferencing line to room in sunny Santa Monica.

There are artists Kit Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz take turns stabbing at the buttons on the keypad in front of them. Thanks to the high-tech magic of the videophone link they are able to operate Fred’s controls from thousands of miles away as easily as if they were sitting in the same room. It’s an object lesson in the power of contemporary Cuban vacations technology to obliterate geographical distances and as it happens an excellent way to inspect suspect footwear fashions in distant locales. While the two Californians are clearly taken the sandbox sized artworks Rabinowitz also seems to enjoy using friends and co-adage to scrutinize some of the varieties of shoes on display at Toronto this evening. Under her direction robots gaze lingers particularly long on a splendid pair of red and blue suede platform boots.

Through it all for its creators of slim bearded figure in a free Tibet T-shirt, hovers attentively. Graham Smith the project leader for the McLuhan program’s virtual-reality artist access program VRAAP and the host of this evenings proceedings is helping his mechanical offspring through its paces bending down periodically to untangle long cord and setting the robot back on course when it plowed into the walls of an installation. At the end of the demonstration Smith introduces the artists involved holds up Fred to the videoconferencing camera so that Galloway and Rabinowitz can take a good look.

I’m working on a second robot he announces smiling like a proud father I think we’ll call it Fred.

Though he resembles no one so much as the guy behind the counter at the local comic book shop, Smith is arguably the living archetype of the artist in an age of such advanced directive dedications technologies as video conferencing and virtual reality. A mixture of a mixture of media junkie visionary cyberpunk and basement inventor he seems equally at home dropping references to the Flintstones and Star Trek were discussing the room entries of Buddhist philosophy. In his works that bears out the truth of one of n Marshall McLuhan’s central maximums namely that the media are too important to be entrusted to the care of business. Rather they belong in the hands of artists because as the celebrated communications guru once wrote they are art forms.

It is precisely this that has lead the McLuhan Program, under the directorship of Derrick de Kerckhove, to foster relationships with artists like Smith who share an interest in communications technologies. “It all goes back to McLuhan teaching me as a student that if you want to understand the impact of technologies on culture, you must never forget the importance of the artist,” de Kerckhove says. “The artist is the one who interprets culture and helps develop the new sensibility that will accompany the change brought about by technology”.