Created by London based experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms, this project is speculative life-like robotic environment that raises questions of how future environments could actively enable new forms of communication with the everyday. The artificial intelligent creatures have been designed with the capacity to learn and explore behaviours through interaction with participants.
The installation exhibits life-like attributes through forms of conversational interaction establishing communication with users that is emotive and sensorial. Conceived as an immersive installation environment, social and synthetic forms of systemic interactions allow the pets to engage and evolve their behaviours over time. Pets interact and stimulate participation with users through the use of animate behaviours communicated through kinesis, sound and illumination. These behaviours evolve over time through interaction enabling each pet to develop personalities. Pet interactions are stimulated through interaction with human users or between other pets within the population. Intimacy and curiosity are explored as enabling agents that externalise personal experience through forms of direct visual, haptic and aural communication.
The tracking and the machine awareness of participant(s) is enabled through Kinect and data scanning with Processing. These allow identification of visitor presence within the physical space. Real time camera streams are processed and coupled with blob tracking and optical flow analysis to locate positions and gestural activity of participants. In addition to the Processing sketch for the installation, the team have also been developing more complex future scenario situations where through simulation possible behaviour patterns could be analysed and further refined.
The project was recently shown at the FRAC Centre and Theodore Spyropoulos, Minimaforms co-founder and AADRL director, will be speaking at the next edition of Resonate festival taking place between 3 and 5 April 2014 in Belgrade.
