james coupe, hedley roberts & nick webb
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coupe, roberts & webb will be in conversation & presenting their recent work
on sun 9th march		    
                 
  James Coupe is an artist who works with installation, electronics and digital media. Recent projects have incorporated cybernetics, computer networks and artificial intelligence in an attempt to explore a 'system aesthetic'. His projects look to construct large-scale systems that can challenge understandings of responsibility, intentionality and authorship in the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer. His installation Digital Warfare Network (Project Phase Two) was exhibited at New Contemporaries 2001, and in 2002 he was awarded an Artsadmin bursary to develop a new project titled I, Robot. Phase One of I, Robot was carried out in collaboration with Hedley Roberts and Phase Two has now been commissioned for Metapod 2003 in Birmingham. James and Hedley have recently received major funding for a twelve-month research project to create a conscious artwork.

Hedley Roberts is an artist that works with digital media. His main areas of research are digital reproduction, simulation and artifice. His projects aim to understand the 'spiritual' relationship between human nature and technological systems as collaborative entities. He is currently engaged in the programming of generative algorithms to test the notion that systems can 'evolve' intentionality through reproduction. Recent events include Study for a Grand Design - exhibited at In-Print: The Evolution of Printmaking, the presentation of his research Deus-ex-machina at ISEA, Japan, and I, Robot. Phase One and Phase Two with James Coupe. Hedley has a degree in Fine Art from St. Martin's, and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art. Hedley is senior lecturer in Digital Art at the London College of Music and Media, a faculty of Thames Valley University.

Nick Webb has been active in Artificial Intelligence for over 10 years. Starting with a B.Sc. in AI at the University of Essex, he soon specialised in Natural Language Processing, the art of analysing, understanding and generating human language with computers. Currently he is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where he researches dialogue and conversational systems.

   
 

I, Robot is an autonomous, self-organising system. Neither the artists nor the viewer can do anything other than make suggestions to it. The system contains a series of entities, birthed in collaboration with the viewer, that refer to themselves in the first person and claim some form of consciousness. These entities become physically manifested through robots in a remote space.

Philosophers, from Augustine and Descartes to the present day have stated that another entity's 'inner world' is impossible to verify or falsify - we cannot know what it is like to be something else. Bearing this in mind, the viewer is challenged to concede that the system sustains consciousness.

The system operates according to a 'system aesthetic', and is in no way attempting to emulate human intelligence or consciousness. The system operates according to logic appropriate to its own identity as a complex amplification of the technological structure and functions of a computer network.

The I, Robot project is then an attempt to make a conscious artwork. Nick Webb will attempt to locate the project within the scientific discipline of artificial intelligence. He believes that an AI should be deeply rooted in the aesthetic of the world in which it exists. At the People vs. Programming Forum, James, Hedley and Nick will discuss how I, Robot meets this criteria, and whether its system, or whatever it produces -- language, movement -- should be interpreted as art.