Machine Wilderness is an interdisciplinary platform for reimagining the role of human technologies in (post-)natural landscapes through prototyping ecological robotics.
Robotics and Interspecies Communication Can machines relate to animals?
A conversation with Ian Ingram and Clemens Driessen
Date: 17 June 2016 - 19:00
Location: PopinnPark Middenweg 20 Amsterdam
On his way to our Machine Wilderness expedition to the Finnish polar circle for Ars Bioarctica, we spend an evening with Los Angeles based artist Ian Ingram.
Ian builds cunning mechatronic and robotic systems that cohabitate and interact with wild animals. His work includes devices that try to relate to squirrels, crows and lizards. Ian's website>>
Danger, Squirrel Nutkin! (2009) Ian Ingram
He will be joined by Clemens Driessen (WUR) who has been exploring to what extent material design - from landscapes to devices - could play a role in learning to find new ways of living with wild and less wild others.
He will talk about milking robot politics on the farm and an attempt with game designers to create new forms of human-pig interaction. The WUR webpage for Clemens>>
Playing with Pigs (2012) Clemens Driessen
Updates
Reports of the two Amstelpark workshops are now online.
The Forest Bathing workshop lead by Judith van der Elst explored the scents in the semiosphere of the Amstelpark and how to bring those into the domain of non-human sensing or even mapping.
Judith continues the discussion during Periodic Table a two day event in May on sensory design and sensory landscapes in Montefeltro Italy.
The Symbiotic Systems workshop lead by Ivan Henriques explored the Amstelpark as a landscape for protoyping an artificial entity and included building dye-sesitized solar technology with Vincent Friebe and Magdalena Marszalek of Biosolar Cells at the VU.
And finally here is a write-up of the presentation made by ecologist Matthew Creasey during the workshop on keystone species as inspiration for Machine Wilderness.
