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© Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie
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With the Knowledge, Information, Communication exhibition, developed by the scenographer team around Olaf Arndt from the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe Centre of Art and Media Technology), a Gesamtkunstwerk was successfully produced in a form such as has never before been achieved. The basic idea was the spatial representation of a network of computers (and computer users) which blend together to a meaningful whole without any hierarchic structures. Except that here, the computers looked quite different to those usually encountered: 72 egg-shaped, self-controlled robotic beings, networked together but at the same time equipped with their own decision-making powers, moved through the room like alien intelligences from a distant planet, while the room pulsated with colour tones and acoustic atmospheres. The project presented current states of knowledge on the complexity of networks and cooperation between artificial intelligences. Robots which were integrated into a colony-like association and autonomously created an artificial and playful world.
Up to 17,000 visitors daily admired these technoid harbingers of networked machine intelligence moving around without any recognizable exterior control and independently proceeding to charging stations in order re-charge their batteries.
The exhibition was an experimental trial arrangement. Information on how the autonomous robots reacted, whether or not they were recognizable as thematic groups, was continuously evaluated. All information capsules were networked with each other by radio. They investigated their surroundings using sensors and kept at a distance to each other. The mobile objects reacted to visitors by avoiding them and nevertheless did not lose contact with their colony. If the visitors allowed the information capsules to glide past, they went on their own independent way. If visitors stood in their way, the robots bumped gently into them and then pushed themselves slowly through the crowd.
All elements of the exhibition were coupled to each other via timecode and spatial arrangement and in this way processed the reactions of visitors: the mobile spherical beings, their own unmistakable code of images, their acoustic environment and the atmospheres of light. Associative film sequences on the subjects of technology development, education and the information society were played into the mobile information capsules. And they continuously arranged themselves into new combinations in the manner of a large puzzle. Visitors surfed between three-dimensional information sources.
Special supplementary scientific modules were engaged in investigating future trends of miniaturisation in micro- and nano-technology and with research highlights from all areas of knowledge: In a kind of zoom from the smallest to the largest, views of the otherwise hidden worlds of the micro- and macro-cosmos were opened up. Finally, the autonomous region of Madeira was presented under the motto Connected Intelligence, with its vision of a networked society.
The project created excitement not only among the visitors, but also among artistic and scientific institutions worldwide. There were requests to stage the exhibition from research centres, museums and science parks, with the final approval going to the city of Oberhausen, which intends to integrate the exhibition into a new science park which is to be set up.
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Member of theme "Knowledge, Information, Communication" |
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