Intuition and Ingenuity...

Earlier this morning I attended the opening day of an exhibition at the Lighthouse in Brighton. The gallery was shown with a handful works that was going all around the country. Being only on until the 26th February it was then going to be moved to the V&A gallery in London. The whole exhibition was based on art inspired by computer pioneer Alan Turning. It was held this week because it was part of Brighton Science Festival. 

The exhibition explores the influence of computing on an art contemporary culture. This year will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing and is considered one of the greatest minds in that Britain has produced. The ideas and world in modern day would have been very different without his key ideas. This same artists was the person who created the well known "Turing Test" which is an experiment that tricks a third person to wondering whether a robot/computer created a certain action of whether it was manually made. An example is shown below:

The standard interpreter is at "C" in which  who is asked by the interrogator either "A" or "B" who created the action.

The gallery was laid out very well with earlier and modern work on display in order. I was a bit confused with it all but I managed to get a short brief with the curator who had just popped in. much of the work was based upon evolution and how data is extracted from certain forms. For instance there was a small digital display with lines with block lines of colour. When someone walked past the sensor there would be new data fed to the transmitter creating a new image. Another digital display had been randomly created so every so often a texture of what had the shape of a feather changed and created a new random shape. The whole exhibition seemed to be as if you didn't know what was to appear next. 

I was quite fascinated by the robot that was placed in the middle of the room. It performed actions every few minutes and occasionally talked trying to display emotions like "I love you." Nevertheless this would not be the case because you can only display emotions with a real heart. The other interesting thing was that if you stood roughly a meter away it would capture a picture of your face and combine it with the person who was standing next to you. A very unusual way of showing how data is always changing.

The final section I was very interested in was the use of a computer robot called Paul. This shows a portrait of Alan Turing by Paul the robot and was created by Patrick Tresset. I over heard that a demonstration was showed last night in the opening evening and there were outcomes that had been produced when I went. The artists had programmed a robot using a specialist piece of software on the laptop and got it to draw in the same way every time. There was meant to be a someone sitting facing who was pretending to draw you, although it was actually being produced by the robot which Patrick Tresset had created. The display showed a Turing test and the viewer was left to guess who the image had been produced by. I found this very interesting because it combined the use of theory with electronics and art.From doing and A level in electronics I could see what the artists were trying to display and make you aware of. Robots may well be used in the future for care assistants for the elderly and it was scary to see such realistic elements being picked up by human form. I thought it was a very different take on art in general because of manually being made by the artists hand, it had been mass produced on a large scale to show that the robots and electronics were producing the outcomes. The artist made the robot, the robot made the art.