As 2018 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular machines, intricate tools and mesmerising performances and installations to the new mediums for artistic enquiry – so many great new projects have been added to the CAN archive! With your help we selected some favourites.
Created by Jessica In, Machinic Doodles is a live, interactive drawing installation that facilitates collaboration between a human and a robot named NORAA – a machine that is learning how to draw. The work explores how we communicate ideas through the strokes of a drawing, and how might a machine also be taught to draw through learning, instead of via explicit instruction
Created bu Jonghong Park at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media Program), the installation ‘bit’ represents a natural random process based on the principle of a Markov chain.
Created by Madeline Gannon for the 2018 Annual Meeting of New Champions at the The World Economic Forum, in Tianjin, China, Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals.
Created by Random International, Zoological is a flock of autonomous, flying spheres that move collectively. Algorithmically driven, the spheres react to their surroundings and, sometimes, to people within their environment.
Created by Luiz Zanotello, Habitat of Recognition explores the material dimensions of digital technologies by examining the intra-active tensions between the distinction and convergence of matter.
Created by Matthieu Cherubini, Ethical Autonomous Vehicles project explores the implications of near-future scenario where most vehicles on the road are autonomous.
Created by Joey Lee (US), Benedikt Groß (DE), and Raphael Reimann (DE) from the moovel Lab, in collaboration with MESO Digital Interiors (DE), Who Wants to be a Self-Driving Car? is a data driven trust exercise that uses augmented reality to help people empathise with self-driving vehicle systems. The team built an unconventional driving machine that lets people use real-time, three-dimensional mapping and object recognition displayed in a virtual reality headset to navigate through space.
Hatched at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, “Ad Infinitum” is a “parasitical” machine that, quite literally, lives off of human-generated energy.
Created by Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch of Quadrature and currently on view within the Ars Electronica exhibition at the DRIVE Volkswagen Group Forum in Berlin, “Positions of the Unknown” is an installation of 52 custom-made mini machines that, ever so slowly, track unidentified objects (possibly classified satellites) in Earth’s orbit.
“Reflective Sculptures: A Critique of Binary Beliefs” is a pair of kinetic sculptures by the Ontario-based artists St Marie φ Walker. Produced as part of their MFA show, the motorized devices sit halfway between poems and machines.
Created by Berlin based Ralf Baecker, Random Access Memory is a fully functional digital memory. Instead of operating on semi-conducting components to represent either the binary states of 0 (zero) or 1 (one), the memory uses grains of sand as storage material.
