Sensing performance: from Balinese character to Japanese androids

ABSTRACT

This article examines recent work in machine performance in the context of an ‘Artificial Life’ research lab, linking the disciplines of visual anthropology, cybernetics, Artificial Life and Deep Learning-based artificial intelligence with the increasing interest in deploying ‘intelligent machines’ in artistic performance settings. As recent explorations of ‘machine vision’ in robotics demonstrate, cameras can be understood as instruments of capture and representation which no longer are simply recorders of images whose meanings are to be unlocked by human interpreters. Moving across a range of performative contexts, from anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s ethnographic work in Bali to experiments with an autonomous android in the Japanese lab, the article explores the camera as a cybernetically influenced sensing device that generates complex feedback loops between entities and their spatio-temporal environments. How does the camera as a sensing device enact a kind of visual performativity whereby technologically mediated subjects and selves are not recorded but, in effect, produced through interactive circuits, instruments and computational technologies? How might models of perception and observation that emerge from the social and natural sciences shape new ideas about the entangling of computational and real bodies spaces in the emerging practices of performance design?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this article was provided by JSPS Kakenhi 22H04858 and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC).

Notes on contributors

Chris Salter

Chris Salter is Professor of Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space the Zurich University of the Arts. His artistic work has been seen internationally at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, and Berliner Festspiele. He is the author of Entangled, (2010), Alien Agency (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all MIT Press.

Takashi Ikegami

Takashi Ikegami is a professor at the Department of General Systems Studies, the University of Tokyo. His research interests encompass various areas, such as open-ended evolution in artificial life models, experiments involving self-moving droplets, large-scale Boids models, and the development of new theories on collective intelligence. Additionally, he conducts experiments on artificial consciousness using an android. (ALTER-3). At the same time, he has presented performance art (Kugutsu Kagura2020) with ALTER-3 and VR art (SnowCrash at WhiteHouse, 2021 Reverse Destiny Bridge at AICHI2022).