Event 2 - Bodies // Biological, Morphological, Social and Cultural by Prof. Louis-Philippe Demers

It was an incredible experience to listen to Professor Louis-Phillippe Demers’s lecture, which took place in Broad Art center UCLA. Prof. Louis-Phillippe is an robotic artist whose expertise mainly focused on machines as media. Though he made many robotics artworks through various means, his ultimate goal is to explore psychological aspects of human beings.  Unlike many other artists, Phillippe is more interested in how audience response and react to his artworks. Therefore, he pay much attention to interaction and interface aspects of his artworks. Moreover, he believes that our bodies are the most-used interfaces for ourselves. Thus, he likes to explore perception of human motions in his artworks.

Decipher human motions into emotions.

Professor Louis-Phillippe Demer started his lecture by introducing the idea of "What makes a body?" Interestingly, there are five categories of the Body and four stages for the automata of human bodies. Five categories are the body as biological organism, phenomenological body, ecological body, social body and cultural body. Four stages are Mythic Golem, Age of clocks, Age of steam and Age of communication and control, respectively. Each stage represents a significant feature of automata during that time. Furthermore, professor suggests that we are entering into a new stage, which is the Age of social robots and hybrids. More and more scientists make copies of themselves and study the mirror of themselves to understand themselves better.

Four stages of automata of human bodies.

More interestingly, Prof. Louis-Phillippe Demers tries to explore how human brain is different from mechanical motor. He showed us a blind robot touching real person. There are also some experiments that let normal people to experience the touches of blind robots. It can even be applied to medical uses. These kinds of explorations really open up a new ground to reimagine the status of robots in our society.

Blind robot.

Further, The Tiller Girls (2010) was an dance performance made by Louis-Phillippe Demers using 32 non-intelligent but autonomous robots with 3 human manipulators. While these autonomous robots were dancing, Louis creatively produced the background music based on the frequency of the dance moves of those robots. Therefore, the outcome was incredible. People perceived these robots were dancing in a group and were intelligent while they were not. This performance ironically testify the how people perceive the difference of motor and human brains.

Tiller Girls (2010)

This lecture truly immersed me into robotics creations. I was amazed by how robotics could closely related to human emotions and perceptions. Unlike before, now when I observe a robot, I think of not only the physical aspects of the robot, but also the human-like and emotional aspects of it.

Me in the lecture.