kostas daflos

first (I) part of presentation




second (II) part of presentation



interactive robotic installations

From the first experience of a place, to the installation of a kind of actions, which assign fluxed, complex, empty, or vague places?

I would like to give you 3 key words-topics or more specifically the conceptual tools, which answer or explain as elements the methods we can apply in our investigation, between the layer of a diagram drawn from personal parameters we build in interaction models before the diagram of technical description and the communicated model expanded in the space in arts installations behind the layer of the existing defines in the city.

The first key word is about the kind of interface we propose to use. The second one is about the kind of simulation we need to do when exploring the different fields in the city.
The simulation we need is a real model supporting memories, behaviors, and practices from human and non human live organisms. (the Simulation used in many contexts, including the modeling of natural systems or human systems in order to gain insight into their functioning. Other contexts include simulation of technology for performance optimization, safety engineering, testing, training and education. Simulation can be used to show the eventual real effects of alternative conditions and courses of action).
The third key word is about the scale - or the scales we use and propose and comes out from the urban total situation, as an alternative focusing in the places followed by the integration of different objects in a new cybernetic live organism. (for example like the elastic self constructing devices such the electrochemical devices of Gordon Pask, the ‘’ Pask’s ear ’’, the " perceptron ’’the '' musicolour machine ''.
I think that some answers come from the arts which expand the limits of real space regarding the kind of interface, the simulation, and the scales, put all these together, help us to explore the race of hybrid objects, the connection between places and people, and the reality of the objects behind the forms of interactions.
The kind of interactions we propose explore the limits of different areas, putting together technologically archaic artifacts, mixed bodies with sound and visual realities in different scales, as a new kind of post-surrealism.

The already defective public environment cannot easily be the framework to activate pre-existing or even new relations with the citizens. New experiences linked to a place, the encouragement of memories concerning the place, personal deposits, superimposed traces, can alternate temporarily the spirit of a place.
Complex places cannot support the fluid specificities, through a programmed design or as a dynamic result from spontaneous interventions by the citizens. The already indifferent public spaces are further devaluated, as the urban experiences fall under the absence of interactive fluid relations in the city environment.
Today, in a unified digital-analogue culture, it is difficult for us to conceive places in Elefsina through processes and mechanisms of a past disconnected memory.

Recent reviews on the Media are directed either to a fusion of digital hyper-reality with cyberspace, or to the connection of the location of a place (an existing device) to the World Wide Web.
In some cases the virtual place of the Web already exists, waiting for its networked mapping and connection with the location of a place. In other cases the natural place is mapped through distributed networks and ubiquitous- dispersed computing.

The everyday life of a city shows the existing networks of places.
We can superimpose on these, the network which is produced from our personal or the collective future memory, from our actions using mediums like: cameras, (video - or web) cameras, our body, and additional oldest and newest devices.

Some kind of interaction lives in active models which can be changed (like our memory) in relation with the potential of the city, in many different ways.
The first actions someone can use to assign, or leave comments, or signs, or put his/her point of view or his/her memory about places (coming from the personal and collective memory).

Resigning the place undertakes methods like:
- Collecting objects or any kind of material like souvenirs from the places.
- If someone derives in the city, taking ephemeral views of the situations someone meets, photo shots of the persons and still images which focus in the existing life of a place. He makes an autonomous action producing maps from these walks which is superimposed on the city, leaving behind marks, as the produced material of this action.
- If someone captures videos and natural sounds, (in digital or analogue form), these actions become the new situation of a place in the conscience of the individuals who are taking part.

All those elements can be the active life between the places becoming the abstract data envelope of a site. Memory schemes come out from the interaction of our personal meanings for a place with the situations that we find there.
Not necessary redrawing or creating in arts additional micro-environments, but rather according to the consciousness of situations (the persons that someone has met), we can reproduce an interactive simulations of the live models of the places, -or more complex elements of a place and real events.

The collected notes on different mediums can be the user material, transcribed or coded in real time, to give the input to a live artificial model. An organism like a robot– (microcomputer) can be planned from these special data information.

The visual technological temporary installations (cibo_05, c(2)ipo_06, c(f)ipo_07), that I use today as examples, are some kind of applied researches in art. These installations, generators of urban experiences in public spaces, help us to undertake public activities, in the context of contemporary practices in the city and interactive arts.
These devices are temporarily connecting real and virtual places; applying automated hybrid post-objects, which use artificial intelligence and networks, acting ad-hoc.

The platform I use as an elastic transforming model, can support radical data envelopes from the parameters which come from the external environments, translated (from personal thoughts).

The “ipo”, “cipo” & “cibo” are active agents that bring the passive spectator into an active & interactive relationship with the subject. The new medium of artworks is action-based. It involves the physical viewer participation & life’s energy of human presence of the spectators or the performers.
The CIPO is a project in progress, occupies ephemerally spaces by creating various planes, measuring the demands of different spaces and adjusting the role of the performers - spectators.

The previous projects of (cipo_03, _04) explore the relations of the total body with the robotic interactive screening performances.

The interactive environments created give the participants/performers the feeling of: a kinesthetic narrative, a haptic experience, the essence of self-discovery of space, the suspense created by the exploration of the realm by their motions.
The participants develop different personal & independent behaviors such as: conscious and unconscious spontaneous reactions, an excessive will to control the situations, a mood to improvisation with plethoric body actions, minimal body expressions trying to explore and understand intellectually the chain-react system, playful practices - for example (playing with the sounds they create), as well as many other independent behaviours.

The robotic interactive assembly (cibo_05) that I proposed is a temporally fluid visual performance linking the place with the performer and diffuses the human presence in an effort to support vague spaces in the city. It is a handmade visual device producing virtual fluid spaces, in a new contemporary form of the ‘’laterna magica’’, set up to reinforce inactive urban places.
The cibo_05 is a generator of potential virtual spaces. Converting the inactive public spaces where the installation is set up into an amplified active fluxing space.
When a pedestrian‘s comes in contact with the Cibo_05, the presence captured by the web camera and actives the programmed robot-unit.
This unit ‘’creates’’ a thermoelectric liquid nebula environment, as an interface, which becomes the medium for the projection.
The visual experience is viewed mutual by the subject & object through a mutual computer interface, transformed in a real time through a projection onto neighboring building.

The hybrid robotic sculpture (c(2)ipo_06) that I proposed, as a closed sound environment and neural system, works like a post -network in the public spaces, reconstructing new relations of viewers with specific sites.
It is a ‘’protected’’ ‘music box’, an enclosed environment, which reacts autonomously to the spectators’ movements and produces random sounds, formed through the data inputs of the touch sensors. Can be multiplied and dispersed, establishing an interconnected network.

An elastic tool (self-directed system) for example likes the cybernetic device ΄΄homeostat΄΄ (1952) that characterized by his creator, neuron-psychiatrist Ross Ashby, as an “extremely stable” system.
It was designed as a self-organized device, -a mechanism for understanding the borderline area between the existence of life and the dead state.

The ΄΄organism΄΄ c(2)ipo_06 works in the idea of homeostasis, taking up in its actions, as a kind of a self-controlled endless responses of the mechanism.
Is an ΄΄organism΄΄ of reverse connection, inspired from the theory of discourse between man, machines and learning machines by Gordon Pask, and the theory of control and communication of machines by Norbert Wiener.
The mechanisms of the ΄΄organism΄΄ are enacted by the conditions of the external environment, mechanical responses cause successive counteracts of random contacts. These contacts are the result of internal responses on the closed inputs of control and communication of the system, which direct the outputs of information, carried out by the moving parts.
Contrary to an interaction prototype, the creativity between the human presence and the c(2) ipo_06 is negotiated beyond a technological contact.
The information is realized in real time by a self-adjusting, self-organizing mechanism, self driven system that does not permit reversible actions.

This automatic agent functions in random kinetic situations. Communicate by a light sensor and an infra red sensor.
It is activated by the human presence and it communicates with the environment via a sensor. These contacts transform the results of the sound effects obtained from the environment into a multitude of random sound frequencies.
The ΄΄organism΄΄ consists of a fixed neuron-network with ten (10) contacts of touch sensors. The moving parts of the arrangement are the four (4) metallic adjustable small arms which support ten (10) adjusted contacts of sensors.
This microenvironment could be expanded, as long by the availability of power supply and the moving system of the ΄΄organism΄΄ which operates in an upper limit of maximum power for the necessary interactions.

After these projects I have proposed a kind of unsteady alive robotic organism (c(f)ipo_07), which simulates, different fields from a data envelope of sounds producing electro acoustic environments, reproducing maps and managing live events in the public space interconnecting these, from a distance.
In the expanded field, the human presence produces sounds in the conditions of an interactive environment. The human actions are traced on the layer of the medium like a coded material map that is related to the real space.

The schemes are transferred to an intelligent object, a small micro computer, perform with it, and produce a kind of personal (artificial) intelligence’ knowledge. This knowledge can react with us and reconstruct various programmed actions or an autonomous life, through these collective findings (data) from the city.

In the c(f)ipo_06 version, the human presence establishes a more elaborate relationship between human subject & automotive organism.
The unit manages the digital information and returns the responses with autonomous movement. Administrate the sound, captured, transforms & coverts this random digital information to analog information.
These transformations are materialized when the unit activated and produces successive layers of scraping & traces. The traces of the movements that are incised on sequential sub layers of a surface are produced from the mechanical motions.
The simulation of the real space is realized as a map of continuous flow of markings, elements based on a non-linear diagram of feedback.
The feedback from the sound sensor converts the information (the action from the audience) into a continuous analogue medium of liquid scripts.

We can take as a fact the process in which we can design our diagrams, we can connect the abstract diagrams with this environment and install finally kinetic objects (motors) artifacts, in a kind of interaction that we choose or the programmed action with sensors as a part of the multiplied roles of the place.
The specific site becomes the new data envelope of collective inputs for dynamic spaces, where producing a different class of the situation of place, like a following layer, a network which superimposes new topics.
The collected information can interact in real time with the programmed artificial organisms; the live embodied behind the interaction that is captured, reformats the shape of the day-life network in a new simulated model of the place with additional meanings.