Brighton and Hove City Council invited Anna Dumitriu to develop an artwork to mark “Walk To School Week” in collaboration with St Nicolas Junior School in Portslade. This year’s events had a national theme of “Sound Detectives” which in many ways focused on experience, the experience of walking to school, the senses being used, how the senses are focussed and what is noticed and what is left out. Through workshop sessions about robot sensor technology which included performance exercises the children learnt how robots are able to sense and interact with the world and change (or evolve) their behaviour appropriately. More deeply the project looked at how we experience the world and how particular areas of focus change our perception of experience. This relates strongly to ideas of mindfulness, and the notion that the sensation of consciousness may be the compound result of our senses acting together in the world. The project took many ideas from the evolutionary robotics discipline and in particular Francisco Varela’s work on The Embodied Mind. Children participated in performance exercises designed to her them experience the world (and their journey to school) in a new mindful way, sensing their environment and experiences through their interactions with it and building on those sensations to create a a more powerful sense of awareness.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
“Complex systems theory and evolutionary robotics for 7-11 year olds, with emergent outcomes.
Robot Sound Detectives Algorithm Dance. The project looked at how we experience the world and how particular areas of focus change our perception of experience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment