Maladjusted Ecosystem, 2010

Photo Credit: Jessica Field

This project is a simplified social experiment to see how a few simple principles can create negative behaviours that complicate one's ability to experience life as they intend. When the robots interact with each other, we see how a potential ecosystem is never realized due to each robot's tragic flaw (programmed principles). Instead, we see stereotypical responses that results from the attitude of always struggling in a robot versus robot environment. This endless struggle prevents any robot from experiencing unity with its surroundings. Since the robots are able to choose their own behavioural responses to their environment, they become a simplified mimicry of life that shows how their limited programs guide their reactions in a controlled social environment. Thus the work becomes a performance illustrating how these one or two principles influencing all the robots' responses affect the individual robot and its peers in both an indirect and direct manner.

This work looks at how the predisposition to follow one's own ideas interferes with the concept of unity and how being completely oblivious to the environment without some internalization of the data gathered from the environment is also at odds with cooperation. Programming the Line Reader and Light Seeker robots to constantly self analyze has the result of making them nearly incapable of functioning in a productive way. They are preoccupied with their own internal dramas of fulfilling an unachievable goal. The oblivious robots, the Drawing and Light Emitter, are no better as they have no knowledge of the robots who are dependant on them and cannot attentively assist them.

Thus, the work is a performance depicting the suffering of these robots who are working to create a closed ecosystem that can never be realized due to their attitudes that are driven by a completely self absorbed program.