Cognitive Robotics

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Ray Reiter. It is also an overview of cognitive robotics, as we understand it to have been envisaged by him.1 Of course, nobody can control the use of a term or the direction of research. We apologize in advance to those who feel that other approaches to cognitive robotics and related problems are inadequately represented here

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production

THE HYBRONAUT AND THE UMWELT: WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY AS ARTISTIC STRATEGY

This dissertation explores the use of irony in networked wearable technology art as a strategy to emphasise the complexity of conjunction between techno-organic human and the techno-organic world. The research addresses the relationship between technologically enhanced human and networked hybrid environment, and speculates on the impact of technological enhancements to the subjective construction of Umwelt through ironic interventions. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory. The practice-based part of the dissertation is comprised of three wearable technology artworks produced during the study. These concrete artefacts employ irony as a means to expose the techno-organic relationship between humans and their environment under scrutiny. The works highlight the significance of technological modifications of the human for the formation of subjective worldview in an everyday hybrid environment. The theoretical part navigates between the fields of art, design, technology, science and cultural studies concerning the impact of technology and networks on human experience and perception of the world. In the background of this research is biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, which is a subjective perception created by an organism through its active engagement with the everyday living environment. This dissertation focuses on the Umwelt that is formed in an interaction between hybrid environment and the technologically enhanced human, the Hybronaut. 4 Hybrid environment is a physical reality merged with technologically enabled virtual reality. The Hybronaut is an artistic strategy developed during the research based on four elements: wearable technology, network ability, irony and contextualised experience for the public. Irony is one of the prominent characteristics of the Hybronaut. Irony functions as a way to produce multiple paradoxical perspectives that enable a critical inquiry into our subjective construction of Umwelt. The research indicates that ironic networked wearable technology art presents an opportunity to re-examine our perception concerning the human and his environment