Dinner for None
A robot must never stop. A robot must follow its own will. A robot does not have to be successful. The work UngenauBot combines highly developed robot technology with an everyday rubber glove performing banal activities. By deliberately exploiting empirical errors in robotic systems and artificial
intelligence, this work demonstrates the limits of technology when things don’t go according to plan. UngenauBot is suspended from three points enabling free movement in space. For interaction, it has access to various vision sensors, a speaker and a hand with a hygienic yellow rubber glove. The
humanoid hand of the otherwise very technoid robot serves to establish an affective response in the viewer. In this installation, the UngenauBot will attempt to set a table with silverware. The insufficiency in machine vision and robotic control systems generate unpredictable situations which render it a clumsy and spontaneous artifact. UngenauBot will recognize various tasks at hand, announce them over the integrated speaker and execute them. Various moments of inaccuracy will become apparent with which the audience can empathize. The questionable services of the UngenauBot expose the robotic system as equally ignorant and imperfect in the relation between human and robot.
UngenauBot / Ilmar Hurkxkens, Fabian Bircher, Credit: Jürgen Grünwald
UngenauBot / Ilmar Hurkxkens, Fabian Bircher
Project Credits:
- Supported by Migros-Kulturprozent Digital Brainstorming
- This project is presented in the framework of the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Website:
Biographies:
UngenauRobotics: Since 2013, Fabian Bircher and Ilmar Hurkxkens work together under the name UngenauRobotics exploring the limits of autonomous robotic systems and their interaction with people. They won the 2018 Digital Culture Work Contributions award of Migros-Kulturprozent.
Fabian Bircher (CH) lives and works in Zurich. After studying architecture at the ETH Zurich with an exchange semester in Stockholm and an internship in New York, he initially worked for three years as a computer scientist for a startup in Zurich, before turning back to architecture. Since 2014, he has worked in various architectural firms in implementation planning and project management. In parallel, he founded the company vonturm with Eva Wüst, which is active in the field of architecture and the development of electronic luminaires. At irregular intervals, Fabian Bircher has also always co-initiated art projects, including the interim project Die Weinhalde in Küsnacht, Zurich and Au Reservoir in the vacant water reservoir Rosengartenstrasse.
Ilmar Hurkxkens (NL) studied architecture at the Technical University of Delft and graduated in 2009 with an honorable mention for the design of a linear city and sea dike, which combines architecture with flood protection. Since 2010 he teaches at the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot at the ETH Zurich, where he coordinates the DesignLab and is active in the landscape visualization and modeling laboratory. He received the Young Researcher Award at the international conference “Thinking the Contemporary Landscape” in Herrenhausen, Germany in 2013. Part of his work is published at landskip.ch, a laboratory focusing on the production and use of new technologies to create innovative instruments for landscape architecture. He is currently working in Zurich, where he is doing his doctorate at the NCCR Digital Fabrication group from within the Chair of Landscape Architecture, ETH Zurich to investigate the potential of mobile robots that implement autonomous terrain modeling methods for landscape architecture.
