Project: SPARC 2

SPARC 2 is a robotic telepresence and artificial intelligence simulator, based around a wireless rolling chassis and controlled entirely through the internet. The machine interacts with people as if it were alive and self-aware, telling jokes, responding to questions and generally "working the crowd".

Utilizing the latest in "avatar" technology, SPARC 2 can embody any number of different "personalities", from movie stars and CEO's to animated cartoon characters and historical figures. Performances will be "netcast" live, allowing SPARC 2 to exist in cyberspace and meatspace simultaniously, interacting and conversing with people both physically present in the performance space, and digitally present through the internet.

The body of S.PA.R.C. 2 consists of a wireless rolling chassis without any apparent external control. The head of the device is a video monitor filled with an "avatar" face. The avatar speaks in real time through the use of a speech synthesizer, communicating directly and intimately with people who interact with it. The heart of S.P.A.R.C. 2 is the onboard hardware/software configuration which allows simultanious mechanical control and two-way "teleconferencing" via a wireless modem link. The interaction still requires a human controller but all direct evidence of this person is now removed or reinterpreted digitally into the avatar. The full effect is a dynamic "transhuman entity" who interacts in real space.

To my knowledge, nobody has put these emerging technologies together in an attempt to create this type of experience. The exponential growth of the Internet provides a great infrastructure for this project, both in practice and symbolically. In addition to acting as a conduit for sending and receiving data to and from the chassis, internet technologies also allow for a worldwide audience of "lurkers" to view robot performances "live" on the net, seeing the interactions from both perspectives.

My hope is to create a specific scenario in which the artist is replaced by an autonomous agent, blurring the distinction between art and artist. The robot becomes the vessel for the being, containing the organs of sense and communication. It moves through public space unrestrained, interacting with people, asking questions, viewing and discussing art. By having the "personality" identified with the robot and not the operator, the device becomes more than a radio controlled chassis. It becomes the individual. Art and artist become one.

Marque Cornblatt has perfected what I like to call exposed wire art: art-as-machine in the tradition of fluxus, with mechanic laid bare in all their crudeness. The star of the show is the artist's self portrait robot. Cornblatt has hooked up a TV-stand to remote control; the whole unit roves through the gallery, doing runway-inspired spins and poses to amuse viewers. He makes great fun of out techno-anxieties and fantasies - not the old-hat obsession about being controlled by robots, but the newer one about being confused with them. For the low-tech part of the show, Cornblatt has crowded the room with Icarus figures - in the forms of female nudes, boys, and Buddha-like babies - all prepped for flight. Each Icarus comes with a hand crank, pierced through the solar plexus, that lets us flap its wings. I like the idea from the start , and the execution was fabulous; something in the fragility of the wings, and the solidarity of the bodies, and letting us become part of the angelic propeller took my breath away.

...In Practice, Alternating Currents is most compelling - particularly in the work of Marque Cornblatt, Daniel Goldstein, Jeff Kotun and Adam Savage - When it takes up another familiar and probably more troubling issue, the relationship between the human, that thing of flesh and imagination, and technology. Here we encounter the issue in two interrelatted contexts: one which considers technology as extrahuman, as an extention of our own physical characteristics, a tool for making the "human machine" more effective and convenient, and one which considers technology as antihuman, something that has overwhelmed its origins, to now shape and even direct human activity. Cornblatt's agonized cyborgs seem especially cognizant of the high anxiety of technological entrapment and are quite scary; in this work imprisonment by technology is literal and pervasive, as in Self Portrait - Acid of Indifference, social, as in Self Portrait - Resistance/Submission, and spiritual, as in Self Portrait - Diver Down,. These are memorial, in a way, to the passing of an exclusively human society, and testimonials to a new world in which human and machines coexist, interact, and sometimes struggle with each other for dominance. The matter of spirituality may be moot. Technology, in Cornblatt's work, looks more like the evil twin of the human.

As part of the defunct Gomi School (Japanese for Garbage) and Critical Mass collectives, Marque Cornblatt stood tall in the cybersaddle. 1994 saw the industrious local cyber sculptor carving out his own niche around the Bay Area capped by a banner-year ending installation at Architechs and Heroes. Self Portrait - MonaLisaRecut is a dimly illuminated still life featuring a green cathode ray tube crowning a green moss trunk, which could use a trim. Many of his existential figures are forged from the three 'T's (toys, trash and technology - the artist incorporates his childhood Legos and Erector Sets), and seems to hover somewhere between technophilia and technophobia. Mounted on industrial pedistals, their steel armour shells conjure up classical mannequins given a surrealist jump-start. The most riviting ones are cyborg Icaruses like the self effacing Self Portrait - Playing God, whose glass head is a pyrex boul housing a video monitor submirged in boiling oil (capturing the cool sunglassed artist not blowing his top) and the wistful kinetic Self Portrait - Steel Wings, whose fluttering wings are constructed from shredded cheesecloth. As usual, the bulk of Cornblatt's sculpture is several cuts above the usual cyberpunk effluvia. Some of it is sheer poetry.