Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
Compass by Lawrence Malstaf
I am wearing cyborg trousers. And they are angry, totalitarian trousers. When they sense that I?m walking in forbidden zones, or I dare to approach another human being, a motor-driven weight swings violently around my waist, stopping suddenly to force me off balance, to cajole me into walking in another direction. I can fight it - but the weight shift produces a powerful and uncomfortable wrenching force. It?s much easier not to resist.
Titled Compass, this wearable robotic ?orientation device? is one of the interactive exhibits at Robots and Avatars, an exhibition at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, Merseyside. Along with London design company Body>Data>Space and Slovenian art collective Kibla, FACT has put together a show revealing some of the ways robots and on-screen avatars could change our lives, as the borders between our physical and virtual lives begin to blur.
The work of Belgium-based artist Lawrence Malstaf, Compass looks peculiar, like an inside-out car wheel; the alloy wheel rim is on the outside and a tyre?s inner tube lines its interior. I stepped inside it and hoisted it up to waist height, whereupon Malstaf?s colleague Tom Kok switched on a pump, inflating the inner tube so that it fitted me tightly. With a couple of supporting braces fastened over my shoulders I was ready to go.
I felt like I was wearing a wrap-around version of a cinema ice cream vendor?s tray. Resting my forearms in two half drainpipes handily provided to protect the wearer's limbs from the weights whizzing around the wheel rim, I pressed the start button and began to wander around a dark, square room. Malstaf has placed magnetic-field-generating coils beneath some of the carpet tiles, which produce ?forbidden zones? that Compass senses, and interprets as off limits to me. In addition, infrared sensors tell the device when I try to associate with humans - something else that?s off limits. When I transgress its rules, it tries to throw me of course with haptic compulsion. After a while I get the message and by tentatively exploring the space I?m in, I learn from the robot?s responses how to use it without hassle.
Crude though it is, it was intriguing to have a robotic technology attempt to control me in this way. With location-aware technology proliferating, could something like this, in an offender-monitoring tag or anklet, one day make life difficult for criminals? And why "kettle" demonstrators if you could slap these on the ringleaders and steer them where you want? Compass embodies a concept we might, or at least ought to, be familiar with - a technology that it is easier not to resist. The realisation that giving in to the machine is a lot less hassle than resisting it echoes the way millions of us have already grudgingly accepted a host of invasive technologies for the sake of an easier life. Many of us resign ourselves to Facebook?s baffling privacy settings and risk ID theft, sign up to Google?s free services which, post-hoc, have now all been linked to profile us, or simply own a smartphone stuffed with free apps that mine contacts data, because it is just too hard to do things another way. Will we cave just as easily to robotic invasions? Probably.
Putting control firmly back in human hands, a static robot model perched on a plinth presents an entertaining idea. Called RoboVox, it?s a downscaled version of this?eight-metre-high monster robot that?s been touring Europe. It receives text messages and a computer inside the robot converts your SMS to speech, voiced in a slightly-bored-voice-of-doom patois with red LEDs across its "mouth" illuminating every syllable. Creator Martin Bricelj hopes people will get it to voice ?your statement, protest or declaration of love?. RoboVox is aiming to give a voice back to people whose voices usually get ?lost in the sound of the mass?, using more technology to combat the depersonalising effect of information overload.
ADA by Karine Smigla-Bobinski
But this focus on empowering the individual is notably lacking from some of the other exhibits. ADA, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is described as an ?analogue drawing prosthetic?, which aims to create a crowdsourced set of images from the collective movements of FACT visitors. The transparent plastic helium balloon - four metres in diameter - is covered in 10-centimetre-long spikes made of coal. The idea is that visitors bounce ADA off the walls (this is great fun by the way, and involves much ducking as the ball whizzes past with its spiky coal pencils spinning), so the coal impacts make random marks on the papered walls. It?s a very low-tech way of coding for an image, says Smigla-Bobinski, so she named it after Ada Lovelace, co-worker and programmer of Charles Babbage?s 19th-century mechanical, cogwheel-based proto-computer, The Difference Engine. As you enter the room, ADA is floating in the space before you. It?s a cool idea, and one I?d describe as "off the wall" - if it wasn?t also off the floor.
A locally-developed exhibit called MeYouAndUs requires less active interaction. The best way to describe it is a time-delayed video mirror. A camera shoots the crowd in one of the gallery?s rooms and these images are shown on an oversized LCD TV after a time delay. With other effects, such as speeding up the delayed action intermittently, you get an engrossing and slightly unpredictable result that it?s hard to stop watching. On a second screen, people arriving in the room see video of their head, chest, midriff, legs and feet chopped and swapped with those of many other visitors.
This modern live video take on bendy fairground mirrors is insanely popular. ?People really, really love it - there?s something weirdly compelling about it. People are fascinated by their own image and their identities being combined,? says FACT director Mike Stubbs, who?s also a film maker. And they?re planning to go global - FACT plan to link MeYouAndUs to a gallery in Ghana, allowing identities from multiple countries to be merged to get ?very diverse communities interacting,? says Stubbs.
If people can adore an installation that hijacks their live image - mocks it even, by mashing it up with those of others - something odd is happening. Has the latter-day prevalence of CCTV got us caving into image-related invasions of privacy without a thought? It seems the time for resistance passed before we even noticed we had a choice.
Robots and Avatars is exhibited at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology,? Liverpool, UK and runs?until 27 May 2012
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