EMMA: New Ground

Physical Comupting

I was interested in Rosin, Co and Madea's articles on physical computing as compared to O'Sullivan's article on sensors. Several years ago I was asked by the Engineering department at George Mason University to create a work for a conference they were having. The asked me to use a robot which would show off the work of their doctoral students. The idea of physical computing came up quite a bit for me as I had to wrestle with how to make the robot execute a series of movements in the same spatial patterns while dancers moved around it. The process was quite interesting as I looked at the abilities of several robots and decided to go with one that looked like a Shop Vac. It had sensors all around it and could be make to follow an object or avoid an object or it could be programmed to move a certain distance along a path. I chose the latter because I could choreograph the dance around the robot that way. O'Sullivan talks about the difficulty of programming as compared to having a conversation. I would like to add to that creating a dance. One must listen, hear and resond as O' Sullivan mentions in a conversation but must create those systems in a program. The challenge of making a dance is that everything must happen exactly as it is rehearsed or there will be problems.

The day of the show everything went well except for one thing. The dancers were moving to the music but the robot did not have that instruction. The sound operator was behind a wall and had to be given a cue by the programmer that the robot had started. The sound operator was late and the dancers were behind the robot instead of with the robot. They did not change the choreography but had to move around the robot instead of with it. I was not surprised to read in Maeda's article that Morio Shinoda thought that working with technology was a "bitch". The whole process was scary. The robot almost ran into some people who did not move. I guess they trusted the technology more than I did. The dancers almost tripped over the robot on several occasions. The floor was very hard and the robot was very expensive. It is something I can do without.

posted by Unknown @ 5:52 PM