Close
When you subscribe to Furtherfield’s newsletter service you will receive occasional email newsletters from us plus invitations to our exhibitions and events. To opt out of the newsletter service at any time please click the unsubscribe link in the emails.
Close
All Content
Contributors
UFO Icon
Close
Irridescent cyber duck illustration with a bionic eye Irridescent cyber bear illustration with a bionic eye Irridescent cyber bee illustration
Visit People's Park Plinth

Neurotic

24/09/2008
Rhea Myers

“There is something liberating about robots created just to enjoy themselves.”

“Neurotic” was a performance by Fiddian Warman featuring three robots and a number of Punk bands over three nights at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Warman and the bands performed for the robots which shared the dance floor with the audience. Powered by hydraulic pistons whose motions simulate Punks’ deliberately artless pogo dancing, the robots activated when the neural net system running on the computer-controlled them decided that a band sounded Punk enough to dance to.

The word “Robot” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. As the artificial workers of the title become increasingly human, the human characters become increasingly mechanical in their words and actions. Jay David Bolter’s 1984 study of how technology informs humanity’s conception of itself, “Turing’s Man”, provides a historical context for this idea; the conception of human beings as computers replaces earlier ideas of clockwork and fire as the “enabling metaphor” of civilization.

Rossum's Universal Robots Rossum’s Universal Robots – Karel Capek (1890-1938).

The inversion of the roles and characteristics of master and servant from Čapek’s play is reflected in a contemporary technological culture where computer games such as Guitar Hero allow computers to demand that human beings perform effectively with robotic precision through simplified simulations of musical instruments. This is a logical progression from earlier games where computers instructed human subjects to dance with mechanical timing. Such games are enjoyable and have the performance-enhancing effect that is often part of the enjoyment of computer games. But they make a Tamaogitchi-style reversal of the presumed relationship of human master to computer servant.

Dancing Punk robots might replace human players in such a game. But they would have to have some inner life in order to simulate what a human being experiences when playing the game rather than just mechanically performing the game’s tasks. Or alternatively, they might turn any live bands that they dance to (or not) into performers in such a game, making a presumably authentic social experience into a game of matching their performance to a computerised idea of what ideal performance is.

Robots, music and audience interaction have a history. The robots in the 1983 video for Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” were built by Jim Whiting using pneumatic systems controlled by a ZX spectrum with a parallel I/O board. They were not music-responsive and acted out pre-set animations encoded into the controlling computer’s program. Edward Ihnatowicz’s “Senster” of 1970 was sound-responsive but used ultrasonic range-finders rather than music to react to its audience.

Robot using ultrasonic range-finders to react to audience Herbie Hancock – Rockit.

Beyond science fiction, robots are functional replacements for human beings rather than entities with any kind of inner being or experiential self. They may look very different to a human being and perform a task very differently. Robot arms assembling cars could not be mistaken for human welders. But what happens when robots are built to replace human experience rather than human activity?

Philosophical debates aside, human experience is processed and stored in the brain. The most direct way of physically simulating a human brain is to simulate the neurons that make it up. Such a system is known as a neural net.

Neural nets were developed in the 1950s, implemented first in hardware and later in software. They appeared in popular culture by the early 1960s with a television news report on a neural net that could correctly identify the gender of faces in photographs. It could even tell that The Beatles’ long-haired pop music stars were male (no mean feat in an England that was only just beginning to swing).

A neural net is a simulation of a simple system of biological neurons, simpler than the brain of an earthworm, that is “trained” on certain inputs to give certain outputs. In the case of Neurotic, the input was Fiddian Warman’s Punk record collection, and the output was the command to the robot’s hydraulics that makes them pogo.

The problem with neural nets compared to more rule-based Artificial Intelligence approaches like expert systems is that they are effectively a set of meaningless numbers. We cannot know how the nets have learnt what they have learnt. Or even if they have learnt what we think they have learnt, as the Cold War anecdote about a neural net that learnt how to spot forests on sunny or cloudy days rather than with or without Soviet tanks illustrates. If they are trained for a task, they need testing to ensure they function well.

The best-known general test for artificial intelligence is a performance measure in a constrained social setting. Alan Turing’s “Turing Test” uses a human judge to compare two subjects hidden in a different room and communicate through a teletype (today, we would use a chat or instant messaging program). One subject is human, and the other an artificial intelligence. If the judge cannot tell which is the human and which is the AI, the AI is declared to have passed the test.

The Turing test is an evaluation of functional performance. It tests for intelligence, not emotion. But where the function a robot performs is an effective one, an emotional one, such as dancing to Punk music, the careful separation of inner life and outer effect that the Turing test creates breaks down. Emotional performance is a matter of behaving in an emotionally authentic manner.

Punk is the epitome of authenticity in contemporary Western culture. Actual Punk was a youth culture of the latter half of the 1970s born of social and economic discontent and a do-it-yourself ethos. To this day, the mass media seem to believe that adding Punk to something makes it seem edgy and vital, whether science fiction (Cyberpunk, Steampunk) or manufactured pop music (Green Day, Pink).

Contemporary Punk is a strange beast. Thirty years after Punk’s youthful historical moment, it must be inauthentic, but a good live Punk band has an energy that mass-produced corporate indie lacks. Those of you who remember Punk will have opinions on which bands were for real and which weren’t. Despite attempts to reduce Punk to a saleable canon, for many people, real Punk wasn’t The Sex Pistols. The history of Punk is necessarily untidy, incomplete and personal to those who lived it.

This sense of style is an aesthetic of what was and wasn’t really Punk. The aesthetic of the robots’ neural net is Fiddian Warman, derived from his collection of Punk records. The robots are being tested as embodiments of Warman’s Punk sensibilities. Or perhaps the bands are.

Neurotic robot. Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (3-5 July 2008). Fiddian Warman.

For “Neurotic”, the Punk bands, three per night, performed on a stage. Behind them was a projection of a visual representation of the sound and the neural net’s responses to it projected on the wall behind the band. The representation was a pixelated grid of greys representing sound frequencies, each row a slice of sound that scrolled past over a label that told the audience whether the net thought the sound was “Punk” or “not Punk”.

In front of the stage at the front of the dance floor, the robots mixed with the audience. Health and safety concerns aren’t very Punk, but the “bodies” of the robots lifted the hydraulic rams out of harm’s way, which was just as well when some of the audience started slam dancing around them.

A nightclub is a constrained social setting, with the roles of performer and audience well defined and communication between audience members limited to what you can hear above the bass and see through the strobes. When you put affective robots into this scenario, it becomes a kind of Turing Test, but I’m not sure who for. The audience was evaluating the robots. The robots were evaluating the Punks, and the Punks had their eye on both.

Band playing at twenty-first century art gallery Mr Andrew Tweedie and the PVCs

The bands played competently, working the crowd and conjuring the energy of Punk into the project space of a twenty-first-century art gallery just out of spitting distance of Buckingham Palace. When the robots judged a band insufficient to pogo to, the band seemed genuinely offended and worked harder to get their attention.

Watching the projection of the robots’ neural network visualisation, I couldn’t see what exactly in the sound input caused the robots to pogo. Once or twice, I thought I’d worked it out, only to be confounded by what the robots did next. The neural net is the robot’s aesthetic and the self (however simple). If I could have found a pattern to how they reacted, then the network would lack internal complexity, so from the point of view of the robots having a simple analogue to an inner life, it is better that I could not work out the relationship. It is not always true that to explain something is to explain it away, but in this case, to explain it too simply would have reduced it. The knowledge that a process that I could not follow was nonetheless reacting in a coherent way was familiar from dealing with living things.

The robots’ lack of self-awareness about their state and actions makes their experience and expression of that experience authentic. They do not know that Punk’s historical moment has passed. They know that they are hearing music they like and that there’s only one thing you do when you hear it. When robots are so often treated effectively as slaves, and now sometimes as masters, there is something liberating about robots created to enjoy themselves.

The Robots Pogo-ing at the gallery The robots pogo-ing.

Robots and neural nets might seem to belong to the Cold War rather than the era of Web 2.0, but as computer games and military robotics show, both are still current technologies. And it is the Web 2.0 strategy of using technology to capture and create social behaviour that is at the heart of “Neurotic”.

The robots are designed to perform as participants in a social event. They are designed to participate in and be part of a spectacle. They are not in themselves the spectacle or passive spectators. They are part of a series of feedback loops and social interactions, inserted into and intensifying the relationship between performers and the audience. They do so very successfully.

At one point during the gig, I spotted the stage door open and made my way through the crowd to take a look backstage. Through the strobes, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see jumping figures in front of the stage. “People in the mosh pit”, my subconscious assured me before I realized that it was the robots. Had they passed the Turing Test, or had I failed it?

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Welcome to the June 08 issue Furthernoise.org where we are pleased to announce the launch of our new net release compilation Explorations in Sound, Vol 3. Music of Sound.