Bedlam
A telematic/ telerobotic installation project, in progress, 2001-
By Simon Penny and Bill Vorn
Funded by Langlois Foundation for Science and Art 2001
Overview
Bedlam explores the dislocation and permutation of subjectivity by computation and telematics. Bedlam is a telematic and teleoperative art installation comprising telerobotics, multicamera machine vision, spatialised interactive sound, video, wide bandwidth multimodal networking and web. Unlike most network experiments, Bedlam links, not just computers and virtual environments, but real spatial locations containing physically active people. This commitment to embodiment is a critical experimental intervention in the development of wide bandwidth multimodal networking.
Unlike projects which utilise preexisting media genres and technological channels, in the case of Bedlam, we see the separation of ‘content’ and ‘technology’ as artificial. The embodied experience of the users, interacting remotely via a heterogenous and non-standard array of computer mediation is the content and the experience.
Bedlam is an interdisciplinary project which models a novel cultural environment from a complex of emerging technologies including pneumatics and robotics, digital video systems, digital sound and network communication. Bedlam is equal parts play, critique, creative and technological R+D. It offers a critique of academic and popular discourses of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, 'virtual reality' and ‘artificial life’. It also constitutes experimental research in human computer interaction. Bedlam proposes a model of telematic interaction which actively critiques paradigms of computer-human interaction and of VR. We emphasize full-body interaction in which the user, unencumbered by hardware, training or highly symbolic interaction protocols, can drive remote and local systems by the ongoing behavior of their entire body.
Description
At each of two sites, a participant moves within an interaction stage facing a coordinated array of hissing and clanking telerobotic prosthetics actuated by 'pneumatic muscles', driven by data from the remote user’s digitized 3D image. Video imagery mixed from the vision system cameras and other video inputs is displayed on large screens flanking the robotic installations at each site.
At ‘siteA’ the user stands within an ‘interaction stage’, a roughly 10’ open walled cube. Beside this interaction stage is a structure of custom robotic devices. Audiences at both sites view the action from behind and beside the interaction stage.
As the users move, they generate real time 8 channel spatialized sound tightly coupled to their movement and gesture. Data about the users movement is passed to the remote ‘site B’. This data actuates the robotic devices at ‘site B’. The robotic devices are vaguely anthropomorphic, that is they may be reminiscent of animal or human body parts, but they are not assembled in the form of a body. The dynamics of their behavior however reflects the dynamics of the users behavior. The user at site B moves in response to the behavior of the robotic devices and creates local spatialized sound and data about his/her movement is passed back to site A, actuating the robotic devices there. In this way a highly mediated gestural communication loop is formed.
In an alternative interaction scheme, user at siteA influences or perturbs the behavior of robots at siteA. This robot behavior is passed to robots at site B, and vice versa. In this version, the robots are in a constant feedback loop of communication, and that system is perturbed by human users at both ends.
Unlike most interactive systems, our custom multi-camera machine vision system allows for radically active behavior without any hardware or tethers. Real time spatialized sound in each ‘interaction stage’ is generated by the real time 3D model of the user built by the vision system.
‘Sound agents’ also share the same virtual space as the user’s body model and behave sometimes in a completely autonomous manner sometimes in direct response to the viewer’s actions, as their coordinates in the virtual space are mapped onto 3D sound positioning in the real space.
The general effect (for each participant and for on-site audiences) is of a space of partial and quasi- identities in flux, which nonetheless carries strong suggestions of a communicative loop between the two users, mediated by network, robotic and media elements.
Finally, the project also has a web interface that allows observation by remote users, whose participation influences aspects of the events occurring at each site, and at a virtual site built from the data flow between the real sites. Internet users can also interact at the ‘sound agent’ level by creating new instances or modifying certain parameters of these agents.
BEDLAM VISION, BEDLAM ROBOTS
Realisation of the project entails development of gestural multi-jointed pneumatic robots. This entails the development of a custom quasi-proportional pneumatic actuator system and local network of micorcontrollers (one for each joint, with closed loop feedback from joint encoders. These are in turn linke to a host computer which interprets data from
