Alwin de Rooij | Portfolio

The relation between art and artificial Intelligence dates back to antiquity. For centuries experimenters have, by reenacting creation, hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. [1] Symbiont# explores human perception of neo nature and vice versa. It argues that the perception of “what life is” has a cognitive and maybe even reflexive nature. Symbiont# explores this phenomenon by establishing a symbiotic relation between 2 different artificial intelligences, a robot and a virtual distributed intelligence. By interacting the symbiont recreates human faces and therefore confronts the audience by mimicking basic communicative behavior.

The virtual Symbiont#a is a complex system build of thousands of agents and draws on the concepts of distributed intelligence and emergence. A fixed set of behavioral rules is selected for every agent, these rules are loosely based on the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO), which was first described by M. Dorigo in 1992. [2] This algorithm is in turn inspired on how, in the real world, ants walk around partially random, and upon finding food leave a pheromone trail when returning to the colony. Other ants may find this pheromone trail and leave their random walk to follow the pheromone trail and, upon finding the food, reinforcing it. The approximately 100000 virtual agents communicate with each other using this concept (stigmergy), put differently, by both modifying and perceiving their virtual environment and acting upon it. Based on the perceived information the agents form meta stable emergent patterns.

The second Symbiont#b is a robotic installation. Symbiont#b is concealed within a metal frame. A parallel machine functions as the basis for this robot, it allows the robot to move itself within the frame in 3 dimensions. Next to positioning its use in mainly expressive. A serial robotic arm is attached to the parallel device for more refined movement. The end effector of the robot is equipped with a camera and a set of infra red leds. The robot has 2 basic modi. One is to search for faces using the haarcascade, the other one is, when a face is found, interact with the virtual symbiont#.a (the complex system) using the infra red light to modify the environment of symbiont#a os that the agents may react on it. In this way drawings emerge by the interaction of the 2 autonomous systems. Abstractions of the faces of the audience.

Symbiont was nominated for the:
Rene Coelho prize 2008
Youngblood Award 2008

[1] J. Riskin (editor), Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, The University Of Chicago Press, 2007.
[2] M. Dorigo and T. Stutzle, Ant Colony Optimization, MIT Press, 2004.