Do androids rAVe²?
A distributed, real-time transmission to mobile devices.
As a long-term member of the Brighton tech community Cogapp has taken part in the Brighton Digital Festival many times. This year we felt like doing something a little different.
We have worked in close partnership with digital artist and Cogapp alumni Grant Cieciura to create a digital artwork that will be exhibited each night throughout the first week of the festival. The work is called Do androids rAVe²?
The work is location-based; its controlled from our studio on the top floor of an eight-story building in central Brighton, New England House. This affords us an opportunity to use art and technology to break through the hubbub of the street, engaging people across a wide area in an experience that they may not expect whilst walking past the usual coffee shops and restaurants.
Over to Grant for some more context.
Introduction
The title of the project is derived from the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Dick’s post-apocalyptic and increasingly technological world, humans struggle for relevance amongst an emerging android population. A central question being, what makes us human?
We are living in a time when emerging artificial intelligence is prevalent. This intelligence poses either a threat or advancement to our evolution.
We make machines in our image. Machines are made to mimic us. To learn from us, to learn from their own mistakes. To surpass us. This doesn’t mean that they will behave like us or act as we expect them to.
Some hold a Utopian vision that machines will guide us into the future. Others like Elon Musk express concern that AI poses an existential risk to humanity,
“In the end the machines will win”
Elon Musk
Techno
The project imagines a fictional situation in which an android organises a rave, taking a cue from from Detroit techno.
Techno music (hi-tech soul) fused technology and sound to create a new form of futuristic music in 1980s Detroit. Early techno artists grew up in a city where robotics and automation replaced the human workforce; once the auto industry declined here, the open spaces of American industrialisation become chambers in which this new sound could flourish.
The word Techno was taken from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock — Future Shock is a term Toffler uses to describe “too much change in too short a period of time”. Detroit experienced this through automation in the 20th century and we are experiencing it today through the intangible mechanics of technocapitalism.
The Experience
The app provides the audience with a short four-stage AV experience on mobile devices: a hyper-accelerated rave sequence. The central avatar in the app is a coin; prevalent in 1980s computer games at the same time as techno emerged in Detroit. The coin is used in the context of the app as a symbol for technocapitalism: this is the mechanism that drives and accelerates change.
The coin spins and accelerates (rave²) through each stage in the app, gradually revealing the unnerving features of a computer game character. The character is a mask of two halves. The duality of the face is appropriated within the project, exposing the human-machine dichotomy.
The face on the coin embodies our fear of new technology and emerging AI: the encroaching spectre of our time. However we (the humans) are the inventors. Behind the veil of the interface the human can operate with anonymity, designing technology in the dark and absolving responsibility for whatever possible futures the technology will bring about.
Perhaps humanity driven by technocapitalism is the real threat, not the machine.
Event Information
The experience runs from 14–21 September from 7pm to 7am each night.
It will run 24 hours a day over the weekend of 16-17 September.
For more information and instructions on how to take part go to https://www.do-androids-rave.io/.
Share your experience on #BDFrave and #BDF17
This installation was built using Neoscope technology. Synchronise effects across tens of thousands of mobile devices with a single transmitter.
Contact us if you’d like to find out more about how you could use Neoscope to enhance your live events.
