Robot Dreams

Robot Dreams
9 October – 20 February 2011

Opening:
Friday, 8 October 2010, 6 pm
Co-production with
Museum Tinguely, Basel
In cooperation with steirischer herbst

Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz
T +43-316/8017-9200
kunsthausgraz@museum-joanneum.at

www.museum-joanneum.at

Robots are no longer found just on the factory floor or as highly developed imaginary creatures in science-fiction stories. They are moving into our homes, taking to the water or the air, optimizing artificial limbs, helping autistic children and surveying fields. But how do computer-controlled processes work in comparison with our brain? How much of our supposed human freedom of thought is actually autonomous and not just the logical consequence of neuronal activity? For at least a century, diverse fields of scientific research and whole branches of the literature and film industries in the form of SF/fantasy and other fiction have both kept alive the quest for the differences between natural and artificial intelligence and mutually supplied each other with of different images of robotic intelligence.

The exhibition Robot Dreams is our second co-production with the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel. Like the first, the successful Moving Parts exhibition in 2004, which featured contemporary kinetic art, it breaks new ground—this time in the field of artificial intelligence. It explores the political, social and artistic implications of new intellectual ideas associated with robots as the android automatons originally conceived solely as mankind’s drudges. 8 artists are being invited to develop projects specifically for the exhibition.

Borrowing its title from Isaac Asimov, the exhibition endeavours to pin down the term ‘robot’ and its association with various concepts such as power, control and fear. The projects go on the trail of pressing questions of embodiment, the interaction between man and machine, biopolitics and various forms of swarm-oriented thinking (e.g. community-organised thinking), also feedback from developments in the realm of artificial intelligence relative to the perception of human behaviour and human intelligence.

Robots act here as an artistic medium, a mirror of ethical considerations to do with artificial beings and differing definitions of intelligence. Naturally, this involves taking a critical (and often coolly detached) look at its different levels of meaning in respect of the Other.

With Thomas Baumann, John Bock, Kirsty Boyle, Yan Duyvendak, Jessica Field, Sibylle Hauert & Daniel Reichmuth, Jon Kessler, Ed Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Richard Kriesche, Luc Mattenberger, Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer, Nam June Paik, Niki Passath, Walter Pichler, R&Sie(n) with Stephan Henrich, Stelarc, Virgil Widrich et al.

Curators: Katrin Bucher Trantow (Kunsthaus Graz), Peter Pakesch (Kunsthaus Graz), Andres Pardey (Museum Tinguely) and Roland Wetzel (Museum Tinguely)