You are kindly invited to the following research seminar which will take place on Friday, 29 November, 2-4pm at MC0024, MHT building.

Speaker: Paul Granjon, from Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Coy-B project and other robots for exploring the co-evolution of humans and machines

Paul Granjon is a performance and visual artist whose interest lies in the co-evolution of humans and machines, a subject he explores with self-made machines for live performance or exhibition. Granjon has produced since the late 1990s a collection of robots that include a set of Robotic Ears and Tail, several Automated Forests, a kicking automaton, a disco-dancing humanoid… His best-known creations to date are the Sexed Robots, a male and a female wheeled platforms that performed their cybernetic romance in the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Motivated by a strong interest in the individual and social dynamics of techno-scientific progress, Granjon’s work provides a humorous yet critical comment on issues such as delegation to machines, digitisation of the social, technological body extension, sustainability, and also on the emergence of machinic life and the need for understanding the changing nature of contemporary artificial creatures. These two notions are at the core of Granjon’s ongoing Coy-B project.

A performance art experiment in human-machine interaction loosely based on Joseph Beuys’ performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) where the artist shared a gallery space with a wild coyote, the Coy-B project will be a performance for an advanced robot and a human in a shared territory. Diametrically opposed to the coyote who was a representative of instinct, a wild natural being, the Coy-B robot will represent wild machinic life. The performance aims to offer a platform for observing the relation between a human and an intelligent machines at a time when the boundaries between living and artificial are blurred.

The talk will feature examples of Granjon’s past work, references from art, science and technology, and a detailed presentation of the Coy-B project.

Paul Granjon’s website: www.zprod.org