2018 Leonardo Art, Science and Technology Lecture Series Making Experiences: Embodiment in Interactive and Robotic Arts
Date:
May 18, 2019 (Saturday)
Time:
1 – 3pm
Language:
English (with consecutive Chinese translation)
Venue:
Tongji University (Siping Road No. 1239, Yangpu District, Shanghai), Sino-French Center, Room 104
Co-organized by Chronus Art Center, CAFA Center for Art and Technology, CAFA Art Museum, Tongji University College of Art & Media
In collaboration with Leonardo / ISAST
This talk reports on experiences with systems, spaces and robots in the context of Louis – Philippe Demers’ artistic explorations. He will address embodied experiences, looking at physicality as opposed to virtuality and at analog as opposed to digital computation in the realm of Digital / Electronic Media.
The far-reaching and often surprising implications of embodiment will be explored. This presentation will look at several levels of embodiment, from the ecological to the social, from the perceptual perspective of the audience to the perspective of the robotic agents itself.
Rooted in causality and animacy, the qualia of a robot behavior is multi-layered, multi-faceted and it results from the simultaneous composition of cues ranging from the morphology to the very situatedness of the object in movement. Physical spaces and objects have a material existence whilst audiences share this very same world. Our body is not primarily in space: it is of it. This leads not only to tangible interfaces and immersive spaces but also creates a contributing cultural context as an integral part of the experiences.
We share and identify to biological, social and cultural experiences with performers on the stage. Phenomenologists and theatre theorists claim that these experiences are vastly grounded in the experiential body. What happens when we inject artificial constructions not only on the stage but also in tacitly human social scenarios?
In the course of these investigations, Demers started developing artworks entailing singular bodily experiences such as being touched by a robot (The Blind Robot), being controlled by an exoskeleton (Inferno), merging with machine (Devolution) and merging proprioception between machine and human (Repeat).
Having these radical encounters at the liminal space bordering man and machine, it forces audiences to (re)consider their human bodies and (re)visit their embodied experiences.
Louis-Philippe Demers
Louis – Philippe Demers is a multidisciplinary artist using hybrid and trans-disciplinary approaches. He works on the conception and production of several large-scale interactive robotic installations, so far realizing more than 350 machines. His works have been featured at major international festivals and venues such as Lille 2004, Expo 1992 (Seville, Spain), Expo 2000 (Hanover, Germany), Sonambiente（Berlin, Germany）, ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts), SIGGRAPH and Sónar. He received six mentions and a distinction at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica, the prize for Interactive Lighting at Lightforms 98, jury selections at the Japan Media Art Festival 2010 and 2014, the first prize of artificial life Vida 2.0 and two special mentions at Vida 12.0 and 15.0. His major stage work, Devolution, received seven prizes including two Helpmann Awards.
Demers holds a PhD on machine performance from Plymouth University. He was a Full Professor of Digital Media and Exhibit Design at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, the academic institution affiliated to the world renowned ZKM (Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe (Germany). Demers then joined the Interaction and Entertainment Research Centre (IERC) of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as a Principal Investigator. From 2006 to 2018, Demers is now the director of Creative Lab in School of Creative Practice, Queensland University of Technology.