Gallery Optica exhibit the work of Jessica Field. Her project Overview of Robot Ecosystem is ambitious.

She has built a handful of small robots and programmed them to fulfill simple tasks such as painting a line or seeking light. She then placed them all together in a room and allowed them to interact with each other, observing their “behaviour”. She documented the robots’ interaction with video, like a naturalist observing chimps in the jungle. In the first room you’ll see a reproduction of a blackboard, featuring a large, confusing diagram which attempts to explain the robot’s program. There’s also a TV with headphones, showing a video of the artist herself pompously sporting a white scientist labcoat, standing in front of the original blackboard, explaining the drawing. I listened for about five minutes. She didn’t make much more sense than her visual aid, and her delivery was dry and unenthusiastic, like a very boring university lecture playing on the Learning Channel. What bothered me more, though, and what I think is the essential flaw of her project, is that she anthropomorphizes the robots, claiming to observe “socialisation” between them and calling them self-aware. That’s a bit much. I did, however, enjoy the second room, which displays her different robot “species” in vitrines, and shows two of her robot videos. You’ll need the patience of a bird-watcher to get the most out of the projection, but I think that, overall, it’s an interesting concept.

Optica
space 508
Jessica Field
Overview of Robot Ecosystem
until February 23, 2008
www.optica.ca