disarming is a performative exploration of the relationship between a detached robotic arm, an artificial environment, and human observers. The work playfully navigates the ambiguity of disarming as a process of physical detachment and emotional attachment.
In a fallow cornfield, the limb of an industrial robot, severed from its technological body, attempts to find new ways of moving. Although the machine was never designed for autonomous locomotion, a Reinforcement Learning agent drives it through a continuous process of learning and unlearning how to advance. The learning process is deliberately slowed and decoupled from the physical body, moments of virtual success coincide with physical struggle and vice versa. This discrepancy opens a space in which observers can witness their own projections and the multiplicity of relationships emerging and transforming between themselves, the robot arm, and the surrounding situation.
Locomotion has historically been considered a criterion of autonomy, at one point, even as a defining characteristic of being alive. Our definitions of autonomy and aliveness have evolved, but our tendency to anthropomorphize remains. disarming picks up on the industry narrative that robots are becoming increasingly autonomous through machine learning, and inverts it. Here, the learning is stretched and inefficient, the autonomy partial and precarious. What emerges is not mastery but a continuous negotiation between determination and failure, in which the observers’ projections become as visible as the machine’s struggle.
disarming is the first work in the ongoing disarming series, which removes industrial robots from functional contexts and places them in performative situations. Instead of efficiency or servitude, the encounter itself becomes the subject.
Core Team
Emanuel Gollob โ research, concept & production
Magdalena May โ camera & text
Advice and support
Silvia, Johann & Friederike Gollob – farming & fieldwork support
Amir Bastan – real-time robot control
Creative Robotics – robotic hardware support
Ben May – exhibition production at BC Gallery Basel
Hardware | KUKA industrial robot arm | Mini PC | fallow cornfield
Software | Reinforcement Learning | vvvv gamma |ย bunraku.xyzย | Robot Sensor Interface
Acknowledgments | Supported by BC Gallery Basel | This work was realised in part within the framework from the European Media Art Platform residency program at WRO Art Center with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.
References excerpt
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Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence.ย Yale University Press (April 6, 2021)
Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. The MIT Press (2017)
Riskin, Jessica. Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life. University of Chicago Press (2007)
