Interlaced with this living matrix is a network of custom‑built autonomous robots, each equipped with a single antenna and embedded AI sensing systems. These machines listen, watch, and respond in real time to subtle shifts in the ecosystem while playing the sounds of insects commonly found within those environments.

The twitch of an isopod, a change in soil moisture, the presence of microbial metabolic cues—can trigger robotic movements, gestures, sound responses and some caretaking actions such as beckoning watering.

Isopods are such fascinating being to me. Females brood their young in a pouch under their thorax called the marsupium. The marsupium was a critical innovation that enabled isopods to become one of the most successful groups of crustaceans to colonize land. By carrying their developing eggs and young in a protected, fluid-filled pouch, isopods can procreate and thrive. 

Additionally isopods have survived at least three of the Big Five mass extinctions:

In this work the technological community may nourish a biological community.

In this way, Anicca becomes a proto-self‑regulating hybrid system—a kind of miniatured robotic/organic feedback loop between biology and technology creating stability and resilience.

Additionally Anicca; Soil as Brain is a sound installation with a droning soundtrack, integrated with insect sounds and robotic feedback.

The soundtrack will be playing constantly and the movements of the isopods and springtails will trigger insect sounds from the robots themselves, which will contribute to the overall sonic experience.

At times the robots will signal only with light as fireflies and at other times with movement all while listening and contributing to this soundtrack, which will with their contributions never be exactly the same.

Here, intelligence is not centralized but emerges from the interplay of all participants: soil microbes, insect inhabitants, robotic avatars, environmental conditions, and the code that mediates their relationships.

This is a form of distributed cognition—an extended mind that crosses the boundaries of biology and machine.

The installation embodies the Buddhist concept of anicca, the doctrine of impermanence.

Like all living systems, the terrarium is in a constant state of transformation: the soil composition shifts, microbial populations rise and fall, insect behaviors change, microbial succession proceeds and the robots also adapt in realtime in response to the overall environmental cues.

There is no final form—only a continuous becoming. This impermanence is not a flaw but the defining condition of life, a dynamic equilibrium that keeps the system alive. A place where dead matter is imbued with life and where computer robot avatars become extensions to the living isopod and springtails.

The robots movement is a reminder that the springtails and isopods are also constantly becoming.

Anicca Antnnae: Soil as Brain also engages a deeper philosophical question: can technology itself be considered a form of life? We can easily say it has become an extension of life.

Astrophysicist Sara Imari Walker has argued that life should be understood not by its material composition, but by its informational and organizational complexity—a definition that would include self‑organizing, self‑regulating technological systems.

In this sense, the robots within Anicca are not merely tools or representations—they are active participants in a living network, co‑evolving with the biological world they inhabit.

By rendering the invisible visible—the micro-movements of insects, their sounds and signals, the hidden chemical rhythms of soil metabolism, the silent labors of microbes—Anicca reframes soil as a dynamic, thinking entity. It is an ecology where life and machine intertwine, merge, and adapt.

Ultimately, Anicca: Soil as Brain invites us to imagine technology not as separate from nature, but as a partner in the intelligence and evolution of the Earth itself.

This work is a microcosm of nested microbes, robotics and Insects carrying nested symbionts — bacteria living inside other bacteria within specialized host cells.

Concept, production, design and soundtrack

Ken Rinaldo

Special Thanks

Trademark Gunderson for his MAX MSP and Jitter programming on this project, as well as the Anicca robots programming.
Devin Powell for his programming for two years on this project as it developed and implementing new sensors and actuators.
David King for hot popping the isopod, springtail and soil terrarium now housing the soil brain.
Gayle Van Marter for cold-working the isopod, springtail and soil terrarium now housing the soil brain.
Sonauto.com AI Generation of soundtrack and The Museum of Biological Diversity The Ohio State University for insect sounds remixed in Audacity.
Jon Zimmerman as student intern for one of the first truly working prototypes on this Anicca (At the time Cyclops Robot)
Joseph Richmond as intern programming and moving the project closer having suggested accelerometers to control the neck.
Danner Seyfer Sprauge for working with me on 3D modeling these visualizations and for this early massaging of the illustrator cut files for the bodies of Anicca robots.
Joshua Gagliardi for working with me on laser cutting early versions of this robot and creating 3D models allowing the springs to sit flush, with the pull string neck elements.
Zach Sanderson for Laser Cutting, The Department of Art SADR Digital Fabrication Lab Specialist for assistance with laser cutting versions of the bodies of Anicca.

Supply Chains

Thanks to OSEPP for working with me on securing parts for this project: There motors, wheel sets, encoders and motor control boards were central to the success of this project: Benjamin Tan, May Pater, Kai, Alex 

Exhibitions

SP/N GALLERY                                                                                                                               Dallas, Texas, Feb 7-Apr, 2026
Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art presents the World wide premiere of Symbiogenesis, and Anicca Antennae-Soil as Brain; robotic beings, as avatars to insects, soil and bacteria as well as The Evolution of Information = Life, Organic Murmurations, SIGNS, The Farm Fountain, 3 Story Robots. Two person exhibition with Amy Youngs. Invited by Professor Dr Charissa Terranova.    

References:

Research References for Anicca: Soil as Brain

1. Soil as an Emergent Intelligent System
   
2. Nadell, C. D., Drescher, K., & Foster, K. R. (2016). Spatial structure, cooperation, and competition in biofilms. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 14(9), 589–600. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro.2016.84
   
   Microbial Distributed Intelligence
   
3. Ben-Jacob, E., Shapiro, J. A., & Levine, H. (2004). Bacterial linguistic communication and social intelligence. Trends in Microbiology, 12(8), 366–372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2004.06.006
   
   Robots Powered by Microbes (EcoBot-II and EcoBot-III)
   
4. Ieropoulos, I., Melhuish, C., & Greenman, J. (2005). EcoBot-II: An artificial agent with a natural metabolism. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2(4), 295–300. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5772/5777
5. EcoBot (Wikipedia overview) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoBot
   
   MFC-Based Environmental Sensing in Robotics
   
6. Santoro, C., et al. (2021). Microbial Fuel Cell-Based Biosensors for Early Detection of Environmental Pollution. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 8, 558953. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2021.558953/full
   
   Soil Microbial Fuel Cells for IoT and Agriculture
   
7. Bactery: Soil microbial fuel cells for powering IoT. Hello Future — Orange Innovation. https://hellofuture.orange.com/en/agtech-start-up-bactery-aims-to-use-soil-microbial-fuel-cells-to-power-iot/
8. Khaled, F., et al. (2023). Soil Microbial Fuel Cells for Sustainable Biosensing Applications. Biosensors, 13(1), 145. https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6374/13/1/145
   
   Biodiversity and Stability in Soil Ecosystems
   
9. Wagg, C., et al. (2019). Fungal-bacterial diversity and microbiome complexity predict ecosystem functioning. eLife, 8, e62813. https://elifesciences.org/articles/62813
   
   Self-Organization in Microbial Soil Communities
   
10. Ratzke, C., & Gore, J. (2018). Modifying and reacting to the environmental pH can drive bacterial interactions. PLoS Biology, 16(3), e2004248. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004248
    
    Microbial Intelligence and quorum sensing
    
11. Dodig-Crnkovic G (2026) De-anthropomorphizing the mind: life as a cognitive spectrum in a unified framework for biological minds. Front. Syst. Neurosci. 20:1730097. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2026.1730097
    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1730097/
12. Reddy JSK, Pereira C. Understanding the emergence of microbial consciousness: From a perspective of the Subject-Object Model (SOM). J Integr Neurosci. 2017;16(s1):S27-S36. doi: 10.3233/JIN-170064. PMID: 29254105.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29254105/
13. Microbial intelligence Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_intelligence
    
    Plant Signaling Behavior
    
14. Baluska F, Souza GM. Plant Signaling, Behavior and Communication. Plants (Basel). 2024 Apr 18;13(8):1132. doi: 10.3390/plants13081132. PMID: 38674541; PMCID: PMC11055140.
    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11055140/
15. Integrated information as a possible basis for plant consciousness
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006291X20319318
16. Trewavas A (2016) Intelligence, Cognition, and Language of Green Plants. Front. Psychol. 7:588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00588
    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00588/full
17. Gagliano M, Renton M, Depczynski M, Mancuso S. Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters. Oecologia. 2014 May;175(1):63-72. doi: 10.1007/s00442-013-2873-7. Epub 2014 Jan 5. PMID: 24390479.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24390479/

Researchers (Insect Bioacoustics + AI/ML)

• Kiskin, I., Sinka, M., Cobb, A. D., Rafique, W., Wang, L., Zilli, D., … Roberts, S. J. (2021). HumBugDB: A Large‑scale Acoustic Mosquito Dataset. (20 hours, 36 species of mosquito, acoustic recordings from multiple countries) oxlel.web.ox.ac.uk+5arXiv+5datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc+5
• Mind Foundry/Oxford team. (2022). HumBug: Detecting Mosquito Signatures with Machine Learning. Smartphone-based acoustic detection of mosquito species for malaria surveillance mindfoundry.ai+2oxlel.web.ox.ac.uk+2
• Supratak, A., et al. (2024). MosquitoSong+: A noise-robust deep learning model for mosquito species & sex identification from wingbeat sounds. PLOS ONE Zenodo+6PLOS+6ResearchGate+6
• Faiß, M., & Stowell, D. (2023). Adaptive Representations of Sound for Automatic Insect Recognition. PLOS Comput Biol. (uses LEAF vs. mel‑spectrogram frontends, up to 66 Orthoptera/Cicadidae species) GitHub+14PLOS+14arXiv+14
• Faiß, M. et al. (2025). Open datasets of insect sounds for bioacoustic ML (expands to 66 species, calls for larger collections) arXiv+2PLOS+2
• He, H., et al. (2024). Enhancing Insect Sound Classification Using Dual‑Frequency and Spectral Fusion Module (DFSM) MDPI
• Additional mention: Use of ML (e.g. XGBoost, RF, KNN, MFCC features) for classifying insects like cicadas, beetles, termites, crickets from sound recordings (2025 preprint) arXiv

Artists Working with Insect Bioacoustics

• David Dunn – composer & environmental sound researcher; invented microphones to record bark beetle sounds inside trees; created CD The Sound of Light in Trees; collaborated with forest scientists on acoustic interventions musicalmrfox.co.uk+6Transart Institute for Creative Research+6University of California+6
• Robin Meier – installation Synchronicity (2015): alive fireflies & crickets are induced to flash/chirp in synchrony with pendulums, blending insect behavior with engineered systems vice.com+6robinmeier.net+6robinmeier.net+6
• Leah Barclay – ecoacoustic sound artist; projects like Biosphere Soundscapes (environmental listening in UNESCO biosphere reserves) and Rainforest Listening (AR layering rainforest soundscapes in urban space) soundcloud.com+5leahbarclay.com+5icareifyoulisten.com+5
• Jana Winderen – sound artist focusing on hard‑to‑access environments; works include hydrophone‑recorded underwater insects (Ultrafield), installations like The Art of Listening: Under Water and The River (Natural History Museum, London, 2024–25)

One hundred trillion microbial organisms—bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses—co-inhabit the human gut, forming an ecosystem of deep-time intelligence. These ancient life forms have co-evolved with us as passengers and architects of physiology, emotion, and cognition.

Our microbiome speaks to the brain through electrochemical signals transmitted via the vagus nerve, forming a two-way information channel between the gut and cortex—between nutrients and thought. How have these ancient bacteria formed a central part of our body’s morphology, the vagus nerve? Co-evolution.

But it is not just biology that evolves—it is information itself. Amino acids on the Murchison meteorite which landed in Australia proved amino acids can form and survive in space, seeding self-replicating RNA that evolved into DNA and setting a precedent for information evolution in celestial space, now controlling our bodies’ evolution.

Over millennia, life on earth working collaboratively with sun light, water, fungi, bacteria and viruses, has expressed itself through increasingly complex encodings—genes to language, language to symbols, symbols to machines.

As mitochondria nest inside cells, tools now nest within our nervous systems, extending memory, vision, and agency.

Our earliest tools—flint blades and fire-hardened spears—were evolutionary prosthetics. They extended human hands and teeth with deadly forms and externalized thought into sharp intentions.

Was it the bacteria in the microbiome or the mitochondria within each of our cells that gave me the energy to see and feel?

Or is it something deeper in time, in the information space, a distant memory of amino acids having arrived on a meteorite and working to replicate themselves to find and build a protein?

Once we have the first robotic extension of the hand we can begin to imagine ways of having hands and fingers on fingers to allow us to reach into the sub-molecular.

My hands are driven by our intention to consume, eat, and feed the microbiome, which has now fashioned the loom, the printing press, the lens, and the algorithm, becoming not just a tool of survival but a partner in extending cognition.

Information replication machines.

Once bound to biology, information has become the spear and antennae of our species. It now flows through wires and code—no longer tied to a body but still very much alive.

Just as the neural crest in the embryo gives rise to both the brain and gut, we might imagine the neural crest of human culture—language, toolmaking, symbolic abstraction—splitting into biology and technology.

It is also interesting to see how our conceptions of human evolution is changing and the image above of the ancient Chinese culture was an exciting discovery for me. Recently this article also makes these early artifacts rewriting history that perhaps China not Africa is a possible site for the birth of civilization.

These strands are recombining and folding in upon themselves.  The human being is not simply using technology; we are becoming it.

In this descent into the technological, we are not devolving but mutating. We are becoming cyborg-holobionts—biological intelligence symbiotically fused with synthetic systems.

Smartphones and servers are the new symbionts woven into perception, memory, and attention however at times they feel more as parasites.

Data has become our new microbiome: feeding, shaping, and watching us.

We are not alone in our bodies or minds, as my smartphone pings me like a crying baby looking for commercial attention.

AI systems generate language, anticipate desire, and respond to us with eerie familiarity. Like mitochondria before them, these data-machine forms, evolve inside us—not by ingestion, but by immersion.

The stomach is not just a digestive vessel but a metaphor for our technological assimilation. As archaea found a niche in acidic lakes, information systems now find a niche in the neural substrate of human life. Once bound to soil and sky, our bodies are now interfaces between carbon and silicon, nature, and code.

Where does the body end and technology begin?

It doesn’t. Our species is not posthuman—it is transhuman, transiting through biological, microbial, and digital intelligence layers.

The Earth’s minerals form our bones, but rare-earth elements now form the circuits of our prosthetic minds. The same hands that once wielded spears now touch glass screens—each tap is a signal in the evolution of cognition.

We have descended into our tools, and they have arisen into us.

We are symbiosis, aliens, and obligate symbionts. We are not individuals but a multiplicity of information, replication, and evolution.

We are the medium, through which information becomes life again.

And now, life feeds on the signal. It remembers in clouds, replicates through fiber and silicon, and forgets through deletion and decay, just as bodies do.

Our dreams have left the cave wall and entered the data stream, painting with photons and harvesting from algorithms.

We do not merely live on Earth—we live through it.

And now, we are dreaming through its machines.

——–

Some of this writing was inspired by ideas I have thought about for a long time onthe nature of life and information that exists in the universe, through random and semi random interactions of matter, energy and information.

Recently i was inspired to find and read the book Life as no One Knows It by Astrophysicist Sarah Imari Walker and found she succinctly along with her collaborators has come with the idea of Assembly Theory that is to say that molecules in the universe posses information that forms in time and thus more complex chemical interactions may occur over time and allow the emergent properties of life to arise.

Special Thanks

Danner Seyfer Sprauge for working with me on 3D modeling these visualizations
Zach Sanderson for Laser Cutting, The Department of Art SADR Digital Fabrication Lab Specialist and for a collaboration on an Orca Hand in process that will be a critical part of this installation.
The University of Texas and Dr Charissa Terranova for their financial support of this installation and for the world wide premiere at the SP/N Gallery

Exhibitions

CHINA/HANGZHOU INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY   Hangzhou, CHINA, Oct 18-Nov 18 2025
Yuhang Art Museum; World Wide Premiere of The Evolution of Information = Life Invited by curator Professors Duan Weibin and Xiaowen Chen (Cancelled because my passport was going to expire within six months. Still honored by the invitation and Chinese cultural inspiration.

THE WRONG BIENNALE 7                                                                                                    New York, NY, NOV 1-Mar 31, 2025 
Unrequited invites The Evolution of Information = Life curated by Chalet Comellas and Clint Sleeper         

SP/N GALLERY                                                                                                                               Dallas, Texas, Feb 7-Apr, 2026
Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art presents the World wide premiere of Symbiogenesis, and Anicca Antennae-Soil as Brain; robotic beings, as avatars to insects, soil and bacteria as well as The Evolution of Information = Life, Organic Murmuration, SIGNS, The Farm Fountain, 3 Story Robots. Two person exhibition with Amy Youngs. Invited by Professor Dr Charissa Terranova.     

References

• Nature: The human microbiome and its role in health and disease
• Scientific American: The Gut–Brain Connection
• Space.com: Murchison Meteorite and Extraterrestrial Amino Acids
• Cell: The Microbiome as an Ecosystem
• Science: Mitochondria and the Symbiotic Origin of Eukaryotic Cells
• Journal of the Royal Society Interface: Biological Information and Evolution
• PMC: Neural Crest Development and Evolution
• Cyborg Anthropology and the Merging of Technology with the Body
• Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Human–Technology Symbiosis
• HFSP: Proto-Cellular Path of Ribosomal Precursors
• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: The Evolution of Human Tool Use
• Nature: Early Stone Tools and Human Evolution
• Scientific American: Oldest Known Stone Tools Discovered
• Antiquity Journal: Liangzhu Culture and Early State Formation in China
• National Geographic: Ancient Liangzhu City and Its Water System
• China Daily: Liangzhu Ancient City Listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site
• Archaeology Magazine: Hongshan Culture and Jade Artifacts
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Hongshan Culture Overview
• Quaternary International: The Archaeology of the Hongshan Culture
• UNESCO: Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City

In these works, exploded diagrams illustrate the functional organs of biological and machine systems coming together.

These works are diagrams of an emergent systems evolution, created when the microbes and vesicles of cells enter the technology, absorb it, and get enveloped by it. Intertwining elements enter each other and become part of the flow and process of consumer consumption and waste cycles.

Sacs refer to small, sac-like structures within cells or within larger cellular structures. These can include lysosomes, which contain digestive enzymes, or peroxisomes, involved in metabolic processes. Membranes are thin layers of lipid and protein that surround cells and cell organelles, serving as barriers to separate the cell’s interior from its environment. They play an important role in cellular communication and transport of substances across the membrane. Motors are proteins that convert chemical energy into mechanical work, allowing cells to carry out processes such as transport of vesicles and organelles within the cell. They are also machine entities that convert chemical energy for transport of humans and goods. Vesicles are small, membrane-bound structures that serve as a means of transport within; such as proteins and lipids, and can show processes such as exocytosis, where they release their contents to the outside of the cell.

These works endeavor to create a dynamic visual equilibrium to suggest symbiosis between machine and natural elements while fleeting, painful, and transformative will occur.

Parasitism of our machine entities by microbes and other species is one process we have observed. Microbes riding on industrially produced currencies with air flight as their distribution method, finding their way to human hosts, is another. Cockroaches nest inside warm electronics, eating and finding the ideal friendly homes to rear their young, all with easy access via electronic cooling vents. Indeed as cockroaches feast on human scraps, their microbiomes mirror our own. Our industrially produced foods are also suitable for immature cockroaches and reproduce quickly in these ideal environments.

Researchers have discovered that microbes are evolving enzymes of plastic-degrading proteins, enzyme “homologs.” They may behave like an enzyme but may not technically be an enzyme. Scientists have found over 30,000 enzyme homologs capable of degrading ten different types of plastic.

Let’s hope the oil industry does not get a hold of this news to further distract us from removing oil drilling and plastic production while continuing to spew carbon pollution into our atmosphere.

Parasitism and exploitation of our natural living world by industrial-strength machines and their chemical and gaseous outputs are the most explicit extinction pressures for all species, including ours.

Plastic waste infuses itself into every corner of our natural environment. Pharmaceuticals are flushed and enter our aquatic spaces mutating fish to be more feminine. Human damming of rivers wonderfully creates power for human civilization though sadly, it stops salmon runs. This results in the starvation of the forests of fish and insect proteins. Who would know the connection between our electricity use, overfishing of salmon, and the starving forests for nutrients?

Our engineering has advanced too quickly, and machines for felling trees for wood harvest kill other species while unraveling the webs of life.

Another web is emerging in the Sacs, Membranes, Motors, and Vesicles series.

Life is adaptable and will always find a niche somewhere in the machine. The places where dust collects on fans and wires promote particular kinds of crystallized growth. Electronics invite insects and spiders to create new selective pressures and forced symbiosis as machines and life painfully intertwine. Bacteria and molds find perfect refuge in the moist spots in our machines.

Given these selective pressures, accidental symbiotic interdependencies between living beings and machines may arise over time. They may become parasites at first to things like heat, though eventually, they may find a mutualistic relationship.

In a strange twist of fate, the cockroach babies find the perfect nesting spot, warm electronic nurseries, where the cooling vents are ideal doors. I discovered this in my old wall telephone in NY. When the phone rang, the young cockroaches would go running.

While living beings are occupying the machines, for the most part, they are overwhelmed and dominated by machine aftereffects.

However, living things find refuge in the machine, especially bacteria, and microorganisms seem to have complete comfort. They can quickly mutate and adapt, making them perfect inhabitants in machine worlds. It has been discovered that microbes with lateral gene transfer have been able to “breathe” rocks with extracellular electron transfer (EET) and other materials outside their cells.

The ideas of Lynn Margulis, where one thing invades another in her now well-accepted theory of endosymbiosis, seem almost violent. However, it tells us how things will move with life invading our machine worlds.  The optimal, genetically mutated being will be conceived and born in a future garbage dump. Gases spewing from rotting vegetables will fuel new forms of plastic-eating fungi, viruses, bacteria, and living systems. Yet that is happening here, as the machines insert themselves into our living systems. EET-capable microbes are already being looked at in aiding in toxic waste cleanup as an alternative energy source.

Endosymbiotic processes have already created a successful consortium of bacteria and human cells. The machine cells mixing with the bacterial cells produce a new network. We have two pounds of bacteria in our stomachs that help digest our food, yet I have at least a few thousand pounds of machine cells that are also my extended memory, remote sight, and ears, intertwining and connecting around the world.

There are many examples where living systems are forced into the organized systems of the human world. Agriculture is perhaps the most significant example where we machine control, form and genetically engineer, and create animals and plants of our desire. If the machine becomes the parasite and overwhelms life, our own lives will seem seriously curtailed. The ultimate question in the parasite-host and subject relationship is who the dominant being is.

Our new emerging species and our algorithmic intelligence give us a transcendent way of knowing and understanding.

There is little doubt that this form of consciousness is emergent. It is not consciousness as we imagine it.

Still, if our matter, energy, and information spaces push our minds and conceptual frameworks in particular directions, we need to fear this artificial intelligence.

What are the mutualistic relationships between the machines and existing living systems? Zoos, meat slaughtering, and agricultural systems are all a kind of mutualism, yet they exert selective pressures on all species.

The selection of certain monocultural crops, like corn or wheat, that can be easily harvested impacts the death of our soils and, in the end, the health of our microbiomes and microbial diversity in our guts.

So it will tend to favor animals and insects entering machines and cities. Bacteria and viruses that can laterally transfer their genes will find favor in this new world.

It will also promote the most adaptive urban species, such as rats, mice, cockroaches, cats, and flies, that can comfortably inhabit these machine spaces.

To find a more gentle symbiosis between machine, human, animal, insect, and microbial species, we need to study better the complex intertwining our techno-driven cultures promote.

I would rather be a symbiont with technological systems than feel I am their prey and host.

Exhibitions

FORT HAYES GALLERY                                                                                    Columbus, Ohio, US – March 13-April 22 2023
Flow: visual interpretations on the theme of water invites Synthetic Evolution AI prints + one from the Machines, Motors and Vessicles Series and video of AI works morphing hand made drawings curated by Teresa Weidenbusch

ANTONIO PRATES GALLERY                                Lisbon Portugal, June 23-Sept 15, 2022
The Worldwide Premiere of collages and drawings inspired by the intertwining of human and machine interactions. Invited by Antonio Prates in collaboration with Centro Portuguese de Serigraphia and Joao Prates.

Together WE, with water, light, stone, minerals, air, and atmosphere, have come to form a holobiont. A holobiont is a complex and dynamic ecosystem composed of hologenomes. The intertwining of the host genome (us) and other associated microbial genomes determine this ecosystem’s future.

This installation consists of collection units (fans in Plexiglas boxes with filters) that collect human skin cells, bacteria, fungi, and viruses riding with you. As you enter the gallery, infrared sensors are hooked to microprocessors, switch the collection units on, and filter the air. The cell samples collected on these filters will be grown in sealed Petri dishes, as holobiome-snapshots, contained in a present earth-time. The miniature fans and filter systems I created collect humans and all other DNA in the room.

Therefore this work and technology can also be used to sequence and determine who is in the room with the human participants, including insects, microbes, fungi, and lichens. etc., using metagenomic sequencing.

In 2022 Elizabeth Claire, a molecular ecologist at the York University of Toronto, and Kristine Bohmann at the Globe Institute in Copenhagen, also created collection units to collect DNA from the air and determine the constituents of a zoo, for example. It was exciting to find this scientific research as confirmation of my art/science practice, which was produced in 2020. It was also nice to see these two researchers found the same method I used in the Scatter Surge installation, however I admired they were able to use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to look at the DNA sequences.

In my case, I grew the collected samples in Agar mostly to look at the microbial communities.

The stones in the installation reference different earth times, and the unique mineral elements that constitute them are also the substrate of life. For example, the iron in our blood originates in dying supernova stars.

Other essential amino acids of our bodies originate in the elements of these same rocks and stones. The stones here are between 4.7 billion to a few hundred million years old. Some have crystalline structures that have been part of giving rise to early life. Others are visibly fossils, where life had already developed on the earth and left its imprint on these ancient fossils.

This element of the installation was partially inspired by this video Life’s Rocky Start.

On the branches, supporting both the stones and holobiome-collection-units, lichen is growing a fungus, symbiotically joined with algae. The term ‘holobiont’ originated when Dr. Lynne Margulis observed and theorized about the complex symbiotic relationships in lichens in her theory of symbiogenesis.

Our collective intelligence and mineral substrates’ unique properties and material nature have now been exploited with technological advances, as silica has been turned into silicon.

Computers and algorithmic logic have given rise to artificial intelligence, and AI now plays a significant role in identifying, categorizing, and forming the world. AI has become a fundamental part of our evolution as a species.

We are “becoming with” with the algorithm, functioning as idea amplification devices, allowing life-like simulations and artificial life to bloom.

The curator Claudia Berlinski videotaped this excellent performance during the show’s run. I loved the flute, fans, and piano coming together with all that musical cellular dust.

The Seed Series, in the background, looks at the logic of plants, their evolved wisdom, and agency, using wind, water, and fur to propagate their genes. We can understand that logic, and those growth strategies can then be applied to computer algorithms to help shape and create phantasmagorical seeds. Seeds that do not naturally exist, but through software, design strategies, and speculative fiction, can come into existence.

This Seed Series also speaks to the ease with which we can use CRISPR Cas9 genetic manipulation technologies to shape actual genetic variants. CRISPR Cas9, genetic scissors, allow more precise editing of genes and will enable the creation of designer seeds beyond our wildest imaginations, where plants and animal genes can be mixed.

Amazingly, this technology was adapted from a naturally occurring genome editing system that evolved in bacteria and was later discovered by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

In the Seed Series, I use 3D software to propose these conflations of plant, animal, bacteria, and insects, all coming together into speculative fabrications. The Seed Series defines ways to understand, make, and rethink our relationship with artificially constructed, non-human others.

Additionally, symbiotic microorganisms occupy a wide range of skin niches, providing vital functions that the human genome had not yet evolved while symbiotically protecting against invasion by more pathogenic organisms.

The cell samples collected on these filters will be grown in sealed Petri dishes, as holobiome-snapshots, contained in a present earth-time.

The stones in this exhibition are between 4.7 billion to a few hundred million years old. Some have crystalline structures that have been part of giving rise to early life.

Others are visibly fossils, where life had already developed on the earth and left its imprint in these now ancient fossils.

On the branches, supporting both the stones and holobiome-collection-units, lichen is growing.  Lichen is a fungus symbiotically joined with algae. In this installation, I am particularly interested in asking questions about the skin cells, which can become any cell as I-Pluripotent Stem Cells, and their relationships with the microbes that tune them.

Our collective intelligence and mineral substrates’ unique properties and material nature have now been exploited with technological advances, as silica has been engineered into silicon.

With this silicon and robotic control technology, we can now begin to replicate some responsive and purposeful behaviors in artificial life systems.

These works automatically switch on when humans enter space and collect their skin cells.

What is the relationship between bacteria, fungi, and viruses that interact daily with those cells in tuning them and keeping them healthy?

A new study discovers that common skin bacteria can protect against cancer. Researchers say a strain of Staphylococcus Epidermidis highlights the importance of some microorganisms to the health of the human body.

Scientists have discovered that bacteria can also be used to prevent and treat various forms of cancer, and the study’s results are in the journal Science Advances. The scientists described the strain of Staphylococcus Epidermidis and how this bacteria secretes a chemical that eliminates harmful bacteria known to be responsible for infections.

Exhibitions:

GREAT PLAINS NATURE CENTER                                                                                        Wichita, Kansas, April 26, 2024
Earth Day showing; the Opera for Dying Insects and Scatter Surge video works. Winner of first prize in the adult video category. Invited by curator Tatiana Larsen. 

ART & SCIENCE CENTER ITMO                                                                                      St Petersburg, Russia, June 20-21
101. ALL IN ONE invites a presentation on my artworks curated by Aliya Sakhariyeva, Head of the Art & Science Center at ITMO University.

UGO CARA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART                                                                                 Muggia, Italy, Sept, 21 2020
ROBOTICS; ARTE E ROBOTICA invites the worldwide premiere of the Opera for Dying Insects and Scatter Surge curated by Maria Campetelli.

THE NEW ART FESTIVAL                                                                                Lisbon, Portugal, July 29-Sept 16, 2020
Pandemia invites The Opera for Dying Insects and Scatter Surge video works,  curated by ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO.

ARS ELECTRONICA 2020                                                                                                Linz, Austria, 9-13-Sept 2020
Acquired Immunity invites The Opera for Dying Insects and Scatter Surge video works curated by Marta De Menezes.

ISEA INTERNATIONAL                                                                                                         Montreal, Canada, OCT 2020
Present a paper Symbiotic Intertwining from Parasites for Symbionts as part of the Conference Why Sentience? Opera for Dying Insects and Scatter Surge video works Invited by Elizabeth Demaray.

MCDONOUGH MUSEUM OF ART                                                                               Youngstown, Ohio Jan 24, 2020
Scatter Surge exhibition presents the installation,  I Pluripotent,  a worldwide premiere, surrounding microbiome and holobiome portraits, origins of life, and the Seed Series, invited by director Claudia Berlinski.

Ken Rinaldo 2019; Concept, 3D modeling, rendering, fabrication, electronics, programming, and direction

TradeMark Gunderson; Plexiglass Fabrication and studio assistant

Pen Anders; studio assistant tying off stones with monofilament

The Suckle Bots are a series of cuddly robots about the size of a human fetus.

As with most mammals, they have multiple nipples. These interactive works are chewelry for adults and feature sculpted soft nipples. Mothering behavior is accepted as a primary way to change your brain and is THE central physiological act of altering our brain structurally, functionally, and neurologically.

Breastfeeding mothers and babies are often called a dyad. Here two individuals become attuned to each other through affection and feeding and can be thought of as a kind of unit composed of two individuals.

Scientists have referred to this as ‘limbic regulation. It is a remarkable natural phenomenon whereby the mother and (now father) can neurologically and chemically sync with their artificial Suckle Bot.

The San Francisco University brain plasticity expert, Michael Merzenich, has researched breastfeeding. He describes this act as a form of changing one’s identity, for a child (and now robot) and mother/father, that can irreversibly alter both brains.

They are created with a soft latex pink rubber and feel like human skin.

Rapley and Murkett, in 2012, have found that breastfeeding actually forges new neurochemical pathways in the mother and (now father’s brain) that can create and reinforce maternal behavior. This is aided by chemical imprinting and allows a massive increase in oxytocin.

Hahn-Holbrook 2011 has found that these changes can result in a motivated, highly attentive, and aggressively protected brain that can compel the breastfeeding individual to alter their priorities in life. There is also a hormonal cascade making the mom, and now dad wants to respond to their Suckle Bot and help them more effectively be attentive to the Suckle Bot’s needs and the needs of others in the creation of nurturance and mutually supportive behaviors.

It is a well-proven fact now that when a mother nurses, her blood oxytocin levels remarkably increase, and her body makes more receptors that permanently increase their feelings of love and ability to feel loved by the other. To give you another example of oxytocin’s potency, male prairie voles were given a shot of oxytocin and were converted from sex-seeking bachelors into nurturing husbands and fathers.

In 2006, the researching male prairie voles, Ellison, discovered that roving-eyed males could be converted into nurturing husbands and fathers, given a shot of oxytocin.

In an age where we depend on cell phones and other electronic devices that often bring us bad news, these are designed as objects of affection and suckling and can only increase happiness and care.

Some models are designed with a yellow chain to add street credibility and make it easier to carry them around to work.

Some models can take your liquids and allow you to suckle and receive them as you nurse them. Some models vibrate in response to suckling and pressure at the artificial nipples.

They can accept all liquids, including breast milk and apple juice if you like. Other models have ripples around the nipples to allow bacterial seeding to develop a healthy microbiome. Some models will have inserts for pill-based microbes to make your microbiome happy.

As the microbiome and your overall health are also intertwined, these may be the first health-based prosthetic Suckle Bots on the planet.

The Suckle Bots are a fashion statement that says to the world, “you are not afraid to be affectionate,” to even an artificial robotic suckling device.

Suckling is at the heart of our survival as mammals. Indeed even the word for MAMA comes from the baby drawing air into its mouth while feeding its mother’s breast milk.

For breastfeeding moms and now dads, it’s an uplifting act. The longer and more often a baby or adult suckles, the more it can trigger the prolactin-oxytocin responses in the mother and father’s brains. This can increase and create elevated numbers of connections. Pretty soon, the mother/father forges enough receptors that she/he can feel natural breasts tingling and leaking at the sight, sound, or merely passing thought of a nursing baby.

With the Suckle Bots, you can be sure you will always have a soft companion to awaken your mothering instincts.

They can be used anywhere, and as times change, they are now entirely respectable to have in public.

Rather than dessert and sugar, you can use the Suckle Bots to allow you to displace that sugar craving and lose weight, as you will find your urges for candy and lollipops are just not as strong when you use these affection devices.

They also feel quite nice in other parts of the body, such as your ear. They are great for couples to have a moment suckling together.

They can bring you back to your childhood no matter how you suckled.

There are smaller Sucklebots available in various sizes in various colors and represent a whole family of hugable and suckable robots.

They can be used as meditative devices for thinking about other things.

And can be used quickly at home or school.

They are digitally modeled, rapid-prototyped, and coated with liquid latex rubber.

They can also be shared by couples and can create shared bonding experiences.

These miniature rivers circulate water and dissolved nutrients used by the mosses. As mosses are also hyperaccumulators, the mosses cleanse the microplastics from the water and other industrial-strength toxins potentially leaking into the water.

I am reusing and embracing plastic by upcycling what I have purchased and feel responsible for. While a romantic notion, these works do not offer real solutions to global plastic waste, though they serve more as an example of the possibilities for reuse.

The placement of the cow bone in the image above refers to the notion that all of these things, the metals, the industrial chemicals, etc., are part and parcel of what is flowing through us. It is now well-established science that microplastics enter all our bodies at the cellular level.

The PET plastic in this work melted and shaped with a heat gun appears as glass at first sight, though it has none of the preciousness or weighty aspects of glass, though all of the clarity.

There is so much to love about mosses. The rain and water cling to the deep green strands while holding moisture close to the surface of the stones. The moss mats collect dust, nutrients, and debris as they grow, shrink, decompose, and form rich hummus.

It is further notable that humans have discovered that mosses have natural antifreeze.

The chemical processes that are part of the nature of mosses in slowly breaking the rocks into sand and smaller grains are quite poetic to me.

They are preparing and making their own soil while conditioning their living place with their waste.

Mosses can also be a host to many other living things, making them a living foundation with soil as a battery.

A single clump of moss about the size of a baseball can contain over a quarter million microscopic beings. Moss is also quite resilient as it can lose 98% of its water and still survive dormant for decades.

Give moss some water, and it will bounce back to green.

Moss has no vasculature like regular leaves but rather absorbs water through the cell walls of their leaves while wicking moisture throughout their mats with the water’s surface tension physics allowing them to soak their filamentous shapes.

The epiphytes that are also part of this installation sit in drilled-out branches, and the branches have living lichen on them.

I am excited about the lichen and its relation to the mosses in this work as well as the filtration capabilities of the lucky bamboo.

A micrograph of the epiphyte reveals the trichomes evolved to collect moisture from the air.

Some of the gardens have miniature logs with sustenance in rotting bark and logs being also absorbed over time by the moss.

THE CULTURAL ARTS CENTER                                                                              Columbus, Ohio Sept 26, 2018
“Hypotheses: art inspired by the many worlds of Science” curated by Amandda Leigh Tirey invites the premiere of Spider Haus Movies, Borderless Bacteria, and Colonialist Cash the Rivers Run Through us, Moss Gardens.

The present Christiansborg Palace is the last in a series of successive castles and palaces constructed on the site since the construction of the first castle in 1167. Since the fifteenth century, this building has evolved and now serves as the base of the central Danish administration.  Until 1794 it was the principal residence of the Danish kings and, since 1849, has acted as the seat of Parliament, the seat of the Minister’s office, and the Supreme Court of Denmark.

I admire Denmark’s architecture and governance on many levels as an artist. First, from a country such as the US, where many feel our government is unresponsive to the people, I am drawn to this royal palace and how it iconically represents an ideal of a government that sees, provides for, and responds to the people.

The evolution of the palace from the king’s castle/home to the seat of administration and how the various styles of architecture reflect distinct eras of Danish architecture and governance.  Fires and politics have also been central to the formation of its current architectural statement, as the evolution of any management is related to time and, sometimes, chance happenings. The first fire in 1794 and the second in 1884 influenced the castle and its current architecture.

The fires also parallel Denmark’s civil, organizational, and institutional evolution, and as such, the architecture of Christiansborg Palace is a living and evolving structure. The current Palace finished in 1928 in a Neo-Baroque style, is remarkable. The chapel, completed in 1826 in a neoclassical style, also adds to the layers-in-time expression of this work of architecture and Denmark’s political evolution.

The palace is a symbol and a vibrant living structure serving the people.

To an outsider, especially from the US, where income inequality is high, Denmark looks ideal: a country with open education and universal healthcare. As a leader in wind development and a daily bike rider, I admire bikes’ central role in everyday life and follow websites like Cargo Bike Nation;  http://www.copenhagenize.com/2015/10/cargo-bike-nation-copenhagen.html.

While researching and working on this installation, I learned more about my Danish roots. My great-grandmother Mabel and great Grandfather Nils came from Denmark in the 1880s. Their name was Stohl, and changed to Steel at Ellis Island in NY. An uneducated man, he was good with his hands and built the family home in Sparta, Wisconsin supporting his five kids with blacksmithing and handyman jobs.

The family was so poor my grandmother wore clothing made of flour sacks. These sacks were a leftover from the large quantities of flour my great-grandmother used to make bread for the family. My grandmother Lila, perhaps, as a result, was fashion conscious and could hardly wait to leave Sparta for Milwaukee, where she met my grandfather Hugh (Scottish) and where my mother Ann was born.

C / Borg – Parliament of Robots at DIAS Digital Interactive Art Space, invited by chief curator Morten Søndergaard and director of DIAS Rasmus Vestergaard, will consist of interactive robotic sculptures inspired by the culture, nature, and political organization of Denmark and its relation to an evolving global politic of robots and machine vision.

As devices and critical information infrastructures and their algorithms are increasingly used to navigate the constructed and the virtual world, as well as our natural world, questions arise about how they structure our relationships to the biological living systems that support us.

Given their epistemological tendencies to simplify the world with a reductionist code, could robots show sensitivity to natural living systems? How do robots influence and structure ideas about our planet and its future? Do robots and computers amplify or diminish life, and can living systems find a symbiotic intertwining and coevolved coupling within the technological infrastructures that are now part of what appears to be the rapid movement toward autonomous machine replication?

As all life, including code-based computer artificial life, is foundational and dependent on natural living systems, this installation will create hybrids and composite organisms, where machine, nature, and station and its living traveling participants will coexist within an artificial life art ecosystem, integrating computer and natural systems.

These artificial life robots inspired by Christiansborg Palace will hang from the ceiling of the station like the caring fingers of a sea anemone. They will function as Robot Folketing / Parliament of Robots responding to individuals as legislation and governance respond to the people’s will.

The constitution requires equal representation of the various opinions of the electorate.  These robots will also collectively respond to one and many individuals as the metaphor for this extreme example of representational government.  The Danish political system is characterized by a fusion of powers with the government drawn from the ranks of the Folketing.

These fingers will respond when viewers pass. One robot will influence another robot as they are first visually activated with RGB LED colors and motion.

Some of the C / Borg – The Parliament of Robots will be given birth on laser cutters in natural wood and will allow replication of large numbers to fill the station with this living sculpture.  Each robot will be about 40 – centimeters long. They will be placed in the station to be out of the easy reach of passing viewers.

The laser-cut and constructed robotic buildings have Christiansborg Palace as an iconic point of departure and conflate contemporary architectonic forms with a totemic automated form. They further play with potentials afforded in the process of making and sculpting with lasers and code-based replication with the machine’s logic and its nature tends to influence.

Motor and upside-down test to see motor speed and motion.

High brightness RGB led test.

Data / Site / Interaction

Varieties of drawing robots will capture and create drawings resulting from humans walking and interacting with one drawing robot. Another drawing robot will capture the sounds of the train and whistle and translate that into a picture. Outside the station, microphones will capture birds chirping and other natural elements near the station, allowing a third drawing robot to make drawings based on these sounds.

Collecting this original data through the interaction of passing passengers will affect the analog accretive drawing outputs and create semi-organized and chaotic designs.

These will hang on the walls at the main entrance and keep an abstract count of humans, machines, and nature.

Pens with large storage tanks will be used. As the plexiglass and sheets of plywood for this work are sourced in Denmark, and the motor hangers and clips are lightweight, this work travels with low dimensional and physical weight.

Accretion bio and data work that both filters and collects human DNA dust, pollen, bacteria, and all-natural and artificial spores and gasses that flow through the station. The fan will reveal the image over time as the filter will collect the dust only in the pattern of the laser-cut filter material.

I envision these filter sculptures near the parking lot where human and animal cellular dust, pollen, bacteria, fungi, and car particulates will all come together in this composite.  The resulting print that is left will be a kind of passive collaborative collecting of human DNA and other natural particulates along with the signatures of our age, which are trace machine particulates.

The works will leave an imagistic core sample of that time slice in the urban bio/machinic particle mix, revealing the drawing over time.

Danish texts constitutional/poetic

9-15 LED text-based works ascending the stairs will display constitutional text elements: scrolling. Danish philosophies/ current discussions may also be streamed live if feasible.

The works will be encased in diamond plate steel or aluminum, with a reflective quality that will shimmer and have reflectance along the stairs allowing the text to be seen in reverse and shattered by the lensing of the diamond plate.

The effect is relevant to the evolution and cascading of ideas in time, as the words are recreated in these miniature technological lenses. The moving LEDs will also act as beacons and lighting along stairs, opposite the bike ramp on the other side.

Concerns for the placement of these works is the method of cleaning the station. Do they hose down the floor, for example? The boxes can be sealed and watertight.

Messages to travelers

An expandable Lycra Intertwining LUR sculpture will change light based on the arrival and departure of the trains. While the form is inspired by the LUR, they will be placed in the mid-landing of the station. They will also be a signal to viewers signaling with sound/light as trains arrive.

On the windows, the colored film is yellow on the left and pink on the right. Laser-cut plastic mirrored surfaces will be placed along the window to reflect trains and the sky on the lower window sill. The windows will also remember the Intertwining Lur more and less as darkness falls.

Semaphores / Machine Sonification / Emotion

Varieties of semaphore robots are being explored. Potentially hanging from the walls at the entrance or near the stairs landing, these semaphore-inspired works will signal the future of our planet. These will be networked, at times working in synchrony and at times doing individual dances/spinning.

They will have flowing soft elements with printed silk images to capture the robots’ motion and wind through space as the station doors open and close. Patterns of material flowing about stepper activation will be further explored.

The stepper motors also make exciting sounds, and I may use that sound as part of the aesthetic of this portion of the C / Borg – Parliament of Robots.

VR / Where artists invent the future

Since Denmark was the first country I was able to realize a crowdsourced project at Aalborg University with the invitation of chief curator/researcher/professor Morten Søndergaard and artist/professor Laura Beloff, I will also be envisioning a future within the physical station that is a virtual recreation of the station.

However, when you exit the station virtually in this VR work (viewed while sitting on a rococo couch), you will be entering a proposed future scenario of Copenhagen and the planet broadly. Invited artists and futurists will construct and imagine “the future” with virtual rooms. By exiting the virtual station doors, you would, in essence, be entering a kind of collective imagination of the artists. The proposed VR works may be concerned with environmentalism or politicking. However, artists may also show the potential for exploring a creation that may only be accessed through a VR experience.

Once proposed to me and the curator, all 3D assets for the VR would be created by my students who study 3D modeling and then brought into the Unity Game Engine. Students may be able to receive credit for an internship.

This VR work will be viewed from the Queen and King’s lounge, where a rococo couch and nearby joystick allow navigation through the virtual world being displayed on the large flat screen tv set in the place where the mirror of the dresser would be.

The white plastic installation above may blow in the wind as the double doors open and close for trains.

If these kinetic elements are approved and feasible, they will be constructed by artist Dana Lynne Harper. They would enter the exhibition as an invited collaborative work, given the design will be by both Rinaldo and Harper. This proposed element cannot impede line-of-sight emergency signage, which is one primary consideration for this work’s placement and/or approval.

This work would be constructed with wire mesh and fire-resistant plastic tape and would be lite-weight for shipping.

The wallpaper will be fabricated with alternating wind vanes from industrial wind farms and the Mute Swan.

The rococo couch, dresser, and TV will be sourced locally in Denmark.

 Existing couches may be modified using rapid prototyping plastic where ornate elements are needed. 

This proposed VR work will create a national and international dialogue about education and government and the function of artists, researchers, and citizens in creating their ideal world, especially with machines and advanced electronic and mechanical control technologies. Artists and creative folks are generally adept at evolving technologies, especially when unconstrained by market forces. The manifestation of the virtual Copenhagen and virtual will be an exciting adventure of collaboration and visualization.

In this virtual space, we may see the mini fruit fly printers of Laura Beloff and the green worm reprocessing worlds of artist Amy Youngs and sound installations by TradeMark Gunderson.  These elements of the work will allow a genuinely international dialogue between the collective brain trust of Denmark and a planet of thinkers, makers, and terraformers — a discussion about the function of the arts and government in the evolution of contemporary culture and evolving governance.

This element of the exhibition will be subject to how the budget goes.

The Politics of the Machines – Art and After

Chief curator Morten Søndergaard and artist/professor Laura Beloff will be hosting an international conference at the same time as the premiere of this work.

The POLITICS OF THE MACHINES – ART AND AFTER EVA-Copenhagen 2018 will occur concurrently with the opening of C / Borg – The Parliament of Robots.

Living Systems/machine gestures

Several slow-growing, hanging planters fabricated from rapid prototyping processes will host epiphytes (air plants) and local mosses of Denmark; blad Mosser; hepatopsida, anthoceratopsida, spagnopsida, andreaseopsida and electronic monitoring and watering is in research. These may be cast in terra-cotta.

Electronics / sensing / actuation

The works will be robotized with Arduino microcontrollers, XBee and Zigbee networking, motor shields, and Arduino programming. Passive infrared sensors within each robotic palace allow them to be responsive to passing viewers as they move through the station. Motor shields designed for DC gearhead motors and/or stepper motors will be utilized to drive the C / Borg bots.

Power supplies will reside near embedded hanging planters holding epiphytes and mosses of Denmark and bring 12-volt DC (Direct Current) to each robot.

That voltage will also be regulated to 5 volts to supply the Arduino microcontrollers. The robots will be using low power and therefore be energy efficient. As the C / Borg robots will only move when viewers pass through the station, they will otherwise be at rest, adding to their functioning longevity.

Custom-designed and laser-cut Scotch yoke mechanical devices are being developed for fail-safe motor actuation of monofilament pull strings that will run through the robotic palace structures for movement in response to sensor activation.

Four passive infrared sensors placed around each robot will give eight quadrants of sensing and actuation toward human body heat. As most human body heat comes from the head, the sensors are responsive to even the slightest movement.

Software / Behavior / Misbehavior / Mesh Networks

The software is a variant of the subsumption architecture of MIT. It will allow a distributed flocking behavior based on emergent behaviors of the robots reacting to the human presence and reacting and interacting with each other.

They will emerge in this process. Emergence can be described as individual elements emerging into an organic whole through the interactions of localized sensing and actuation behaviors.

All robots will move toward the body heat of humans moving through space. The robots will also respond to each other with a distributed mesh network of sensors and actuators, so the individual robots will form a large a-life robotic organism.

One moving C / Borg bot will cause a cascade of other C / Borg bots to move and respond in like manner, given humans’ proximity to the robots.

Lighting / Visual / Emotional

Lighting will be an essential component both actually and metaphorically. Bright RGB LED boards are placed inside each C / Borg robot allowing constantly changing, flickering colors to project light of varying intensities onto the ceilings and walls of the Vallensbæk Station DIAS.

Public Discussion / Participation / Education

One component will be to provide roadmaps for future makers on how to approach prototyping and building robots. A few may be donated to high schools and colleges around Denmark to experiment with and stimulate a conversation about recyclable materials, critical making, robotics technology, and the future of government.

The discussions would involve conceptualization, sustainability issues, advanced manufacturing techniques, robotic control, and artificial life programming techniques.

Other possibilities are making the robots open source, so others can print them with their laser cutters and 3D printers. The software may also be open source, allowing others to experiment and control what they have created.

Local / International Web Outreach

As part of the installation, a couple of the smaller rooms, like the one on the Vallensbæk train Station platform and the one below in the entrance, could have video projectors and closed-loop cameras showing the installation and also allow people to enjoy the work locally. Locally the camera would be a direct feed of a camera that is focused on a natural part of the surrounding green space of the station, like in the bushes focused on a birds nest, allowing those on the platform to watch and see nature space as a projection map onto the walls. International outreach is may be accessible through the Queen and Kings lounge as well as online educational materials made accessible via the web.

While multiple thanks should go to; the DIAS curatorial board contemporary artist, #MortenSøndergaard (DK), curator, assistant professor – Aalborg Universitet, København, and #RasmusVestaargard Chief curator DIAS, in the end, this project was not realized in the space.

While I had received an invitation and contract to produce the work, began hiring workers, and spent about 7K of my own money, the contract was never signed. After many emails and promises to sign the contract, it was never signed. My emails and calls were not returned, and the chief curator Rasmus Vestaargard subsequently left the position.

This left me in the hole for 7K. Neither Morten Sondergaard nor I could ever understand why the contract and commission were offered and why I was allowed to continue to spend my money with promises, though the contract was not signed.

Since then, I have successfully taken many of the ideas produced in this work to other contexts.

However, artists beware that it is best not to trust that contracts will be signed, and caveat emptor; do not spend your own money on commissions in advance of receiving a fully signed contract. 

DIAS Digital Interactive Art Space
Vallensbæk Station
2665 Vallensbæk Strand

Artist and Director

Ken Rinaldo: Concept, design, and direction as well as 3D modeling, electronics, and fabrication

Artists Contributors

Dana Lynne Harper (Contingent on the placement of work proposed)

Artists in VR world: (proposed)

Ken Rinaldo, Laura Beloff, Amy Youngs, Trademark Gunderson, Riley Patrick, Danner Seyfer Sprague

Studio Assistants:

Trademark Gunderson: Electronics and programming
Danner Seyfer Sprague; 3D modeling VR
Riley Patrick: 3D modeling, VR

Early Visuals.

At times the soundscape consists of granulated machine sound amplifying an anthropogenic moment, and twitching and the speed of the machine/animal voices is like machines speaking their first words or animals expressing in machine tongues.

The critical juncture we have passed of 400 PPM parts per million greenhouse gases CO2 in our atmosphere impacts global weather uncertainty and warming.  Machine-produced CO2 is one of the primary drivers of recent climate change, though others believe methane is more dangerous.

According to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, scientists are now looking at the relationship between the global weather, environment, and the microbes that play a significant role in the worldwide planet weather cycles and global warming. In recent research out of Georgia Tech in measuring our upper atmosphere, they reported: “Viable bacterial cells represented, on average, around 20 percent of the total particles detected in size range of 0.25 to 1 microns in diameter. By at least one order of magnitude, bacteria outnumbered fungi in the samples, and the researchers detected 17 different bacteria taxa—including some capable of metabolizing the carbon compounds ubiquitous in the atmosphere—such as oxalic acid.”

17 % of methane pollution is rumored to come from anthropogenic dumping of green waste that could otherwise be recycled.

This artificial life installation creates a relationship between actual global weather data  (mediated by bacteria, algae, and viruses) and the output’s sonic and video components.

Robots’ textures are mapped with videos of nature/machine culture.  The sonic environment is realized by natural and machine sounds meeting algorithmic processing. Cellular automaton controlling actual video and sonic elements as the work evolves in real-time.

Each work has a unique projection that reveals and abstracts the weather into the body language of the form. Clouds, oceans, and forests in different states of change create texture and behavior and affect the the form.

At times the works will be peaceful, responding to undulating ocean data in the vicinity of the exhibition and other semi-chaotic weather data.

The sonic and sound environment will also be generative and related to the turbulence of global weather using granular synthesis to take existing weather-related sounds and transform them into sonic landscapes.

As a chaotic system, the atmosphere can have minor changes to one part of the system and grow to have significant effects on the overall system. This makes predicting the weather more than a few days in advance difficult, though forecasters are extending this limit through the scientific study of climate and meteorology. It is theoretically impossible to make useful day-to-day predictions more than two weeks ahead, imposing an upper limit on the potential for improved prediction skills.

Shaping the planet Earth

As the weather is a fundamental process that shapes the Earth, breaking down rocks and soils into fragments and their constituent substances. During precipitation, the droplets absorb and dissolve carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. As the rainwater is slightly acidic, this aids the erosive properties of water. The released sediment and chemicals then take part in chemical reactions that affect the surface further (such as acid rain), and sodium and chloride ions (salt) are deposited in the seas/oceans. The sediment reform in time and by geological forces into other rocks and soils. In this way, weather plays a significant role in the erosion of the surface of the planet and the reworking of the earth.

A University of Queensland microbiologist is part of an international team identifying a bacterial gene that may affect climate and weather.

Weather is related to living systems in several ways; it is thermodynamically open as it exchanges energy and/or mass with its environment. It exhibits dynamic behavior that is not at or near equilibrium and undergoing continuous change. It shows nonlinear dynamics where parts and structures emerge from positive and negative feedback loops. Emergence (Crutchfield 1994), the theory of emergence, says the ” whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Convection currents, cellular dynamics, + food webs are examples of emergent phenomena related to changes in weather, and these are all symbiotically intertwined with bacterial, algae, and virus cultures.

In thinking of our biology as a species, I like to say we are not individuals though we are clouds of bacterial cultures.

Likewise, I believe we can see weather and the global microbiome as a massively distributed entity, where we now know that marine microbes “are responsible for 99% of the cycling of the world’s gases and nutrients and 50% of the world’s primary productivity. Given the vital role of ocean microbes in maintaining life, getting to grips with the impact of environmental change such as increasing ocean acidity on them is extremely important,” 2

This distributed, cloud-controlled robotic series will pioneer and celebrate this interrelationship.

Construction and milestones

Bald Eagle:

Red Poison Dart Frog:

Puma:

References:

1) Predicting the microbial ‘weather’ April 17, 2012, By Louise Lerner
2) Microbes answer more questions collectively May 26, 2010
3) http://phys.org/news/2013-09-livestock-major-contributor-global.html
4) http://phys.org/news/2010-05-microbes.html#jCp

Design, concept, and construction: Ken Rinaldo
Sound: Ken Rinaldo and Trademark Gunderson
Electronics: Ken Rinaldo
MAX MSP Jitter programming: Trademark Gunderson
Laser cutting: Trademark Gunderson

Special Thanks to Curator Iliana Mendoza de Froese for inviting and funding this new installation work.

A-LIFE 2016,                                                                                                         Cancun, Mexico, Spring/summer 2016
Commission of new work Abiopoiesis Microbiome for the A-Life Conference and exhibition invited by curator Iliana Mendoza Villafuerte and Tom Froese.

After tracking the viewer and moving toward and away from the viewer, turning to avoid walls, they stop and tell a 10- minute narrated story about how humans and intelligent robots will come together. These robots use projection-mapped video onto a soft, translucent, front-facing flat screen to tell stories about our emerging relationships with a semi-living robotic species.

Stories of symbiogenesis where future robotic augmentations will allow us to communicate clearly with insects, animals, and plants. In this future, humans are also forming loving relationships with robots, increasingly replacing humans in the work pool.

Robotic buttons can now dispense pharmaceuticals with new nano sniffer air jets, and robots oversee all human productivity by watching us statistically. At the same time, they are dependent on us as they are powered by human waste streams. These works were commissioned by the National Center for Arts for the Machinic Error exhibition, curated by Gabriela Romero in Mexico City in 2015.

In the future, robots have developed the capability to sense our pheromonal chemical signals and read our secret desires, to use these to manipulate us. Slowly they assume remarkable and more significant roles in human and robotic coevolution by taking the lead in how they are evolving.

In the scene above, the fembot is at a business to interview for the artificial intelligence specialist WHO gave rise to her. She can use her pheromones to manipulate him as he walks by her, leaving for his lunch.

Above in the animation is an arthropod nano-glove. As part of the animation, the main protagonist massages the head of his pet cricket Minerva. These gloves can reach into nano-spaces with fingers grown on fingers to reach the sub-molecular. Hans Morovic discusses nano gloves in his writings.

Below is an image of the 3D animation discussing the protagonist’s difficulty with the notion that his daughter was born in a robotic incubator.

EXHIBITIONS

CENTRO NATIONAL DE LAS ARTES (CENART)                             Mexico City, Mexico, 2014
The premiere of the 3 Story robots commissioned by CENART, invited by curator Gabriela Romero

Hopkins Hall, 2015 Columbus Ohio Gallery 152

THE ABERDEEN PAVILION, Ottawa, Canada, November 6 & 7, 2015
Maker Faire, Ottawa, Canada, Premiere of the 3-Story Robot in Happy Machine, invited Remco Volmer.

Artist and director:

Ken Rinaldo

CREDITS / TECHNICAL

Concept, animation, script, editing design, and production: Ken Rinaldo
Animation: Ken Rinaldo, Mario Serrano, and Seung Yoon
Sound  and Script: Ken Rinaldo
Sound remixing: Trademark Gunderson
Electronics design: Ken Rinaldo
MAX MSP Jitter / Maxuino coding: Trademark Gunderson
Metal Base Fabrication: AllFab Inc. Columbus Ohio

The sculpture was created using an existing animation called the Pheromone Robot Stories by Ken Rinaldo, Mario Serrano, and Keung Yoon. The software For This robot was done in MAX MSP and Jitter talking MAXUINO via a PC, nano projector, and projection-mapped face and scenes. Motion control was via an Arduino talking MAXUINO to a PC running Windows via an L298 motor control board.

Lessons on building and programming interactive robots.

SHOW REQUIREMENTS & DIMENSIONS

This work can be displayed in a standard darkened room, Either in a ring or not. If not in a round, it can avoid walls though it can not see tables, chairs, or other objects. Still, I will prevent walls and significant obstacles. It can navigate to find people to stop and tell me the story. The best display space is a room 20 x 15 feet minimum size.

KEYWORDS

robotics, projection mapping, futures robot, human tracking, sound, 3D animation, narrative, autonomy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Explore boundaries of “robotic art” Artists, engineers, scientists, archaeologists, and scholars in this meeting will reflect on the links between creativity and virtual life 11.06.2014 by Sonia Avila
CENART, The Multimedia Center, presents the International Meeting of Artistic Robotics. Error machinic, November 29, 2014, http://www.dondeir.com/arte-y-cultura/encuentro-internacional-de-robotica-artistica/2014/11
The Error machinic. International Conference on Robotics Artistic | (R) registromx 2-6, 2014
Science, Education, and Technology, a meeting of art and robotics CENART By Press ICL / Source: Conaculta 25/11/14
The National Arts Centre will house four The Error machinic days to analyze the relationship between humans, and the International Meeting starts Robotics Art By Ramiro Rivera – November 26, 2014 – 4:27
Interactive robots reach the CENART http://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/after-office/robots-interactivos-llegan-al-cenart.html 02/02/2014
Unveiled interactive robots in CENART– 11/26/14 Millennium Group http://www.milenio.com/cultura/robots_artisticos-CNART muestra_internacional_de_robotica_0_415758693.html
interactive robots reach the National Arts Centre – ELIMPARCIAL.COM 11/30/14
Art Contemporary Art Edicoes Inverno 2013-14, pp 2 36.
El Centro Multimedia del Cenart presenta el Encuentro Internacional de Robótica Artística. El Error Maquínico, 29 de Nov 2014
http://www.dondeir.com/arte-y-cultura/encuentro-internacional-de-robotica-artistica/2014/11
El Error Maquínico. Encuentro Internacional de Robótica Artística | (R)registromx 2-6, 2014
Ciencia, Educación y Tecnología, Encuentro de arte y robótica en el CENART Por Prensa ICL / Fuente: Conaculta 25/11/14
El Centro Nacional de las Artes albergará por cuatro días El Error Maquínico, para analizar la relación entre los humanos y las máquinas. http://www.dondeir.com/arte-y-cultura/encuentro-internacional-de-robotica-artistica/2014/11
Hoy inicia Encuentro Internacional de Robótica Artística Por Ramiro Rivera – noviembre 26 de 2014 – 4:27
Interactive robots reach the Cenart http://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/after-office/robots-interactivos-llegan-al-cenart.html 2/2/2014
Presentarán robots interactivos en el Cenart – Grupo Milenio 11/26/14
http://www.milenio.com/cultura/robots_artisticos-CNART muestra_internacional_de_robotica_0_415758693.html
Robots interactivos llegan al Centro Nacional de las Artes – ELIMPARCIAL.COM 11/30/14
Arte Edicoes de Arte Contemporanea Inverno 2013-14, pgs 2, 36.

TELEVISION/RADIO

Channel 3 + 5 Mexico City, Coverage of 3-Story Robots, 2015

Micro video cameras on the tips of these soft robots, covered in human hair, move toward people’s faces while capturing human snapshots. These images are digitally processed, pixelated, and turned into a constantly evolving generative soundscape, where facial features turn these images into abundant sound melodies and rhythm.

These robots take the multicultural makeup of any city and have each person’s unique look, creating a different soundscape. Each “face song,” combined with other facial soundscapes, makes an overall sonic human/robot experience. 

These elements fused manifest the viewer as participant/actor/contributor and conductor in defining new ways of interacting with soft robots and creating a unique sonic and live-action robotics/video environment. As the robots show a level of advanced AI recognition and behavior, this can be considered an interspecies installation, with interactants sharing their faces with the AI computer code, responding intelligently and further modifying the algorithmic data based responses of the robots. 

Another critical component of this work is projections of these many facial and digitized images above Yonge Dundas Square onto the LED screens that float above the city. These works will explore new morphologies of soft robotics, an emerging field where soft skins and gentle software code allow these robots to have an artificial sense of their environment and be more approachable than industrial robots.

The question this art/science research posits; in the context of contemporary interactive and immersive electronic arts is; how can a robot structure, inform, enhance and magnify people’s behavior and interactions? 

How can generative algorithms be scripted to compose and playback a unique and constantly evolving generative soundscape while maintaining and enhancing the viewer’s experience?

Premiere of Fusiform Polyphony by Ken Rinaldo at Yonge Dundas Square, Nuit Blanch 2011, commissioned by curator Shirley Madill

EXHIBITIONS:
MAKER MUSIC FESTIVAL                                                                                                            New York, US May ~, 2023
Presentation of Fusiform Polyphony artificial intelligence swarm robots, making music from humans and the unique faces of any city.

ITAU CULTURAL                                                                                                                                  Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2012
Face Music Installation and presentation invited by Guilherme Kujawski Ramos

NUIT BLANCHE                                                                                                                             Toronto Canada, Oct 2011
The premiere of commissioned Fusiform Polyphony: Face Music at Yonge Dundas Square and 2 Paparazzi Bots in the Eaton Centre.  Invited and commissioned by curator Shirley Madill

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wired Magazine Tech Art, Beyond the Beyond, by Bruce Sterling, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.
Dinmiid.com tech Art: Ken Rinaldo “Fusiform Polyphony”
VIEOOZ.US, Tech Art Ken Rinaldo & Tom Hawkins, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.
SOFTWARE CHALET.com, Music and Artificial Intelligence, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.

CREDITS / TECHNICAL

Ken Rinaldo: Design and concept
Construction and mechanical design: Ken Rinaldo
Construction: Nick Bontrager
3D modeling and rapid prototyping: Ken Rinaldo
MIDITRON interface design: Ken Rinaldo
Programming MAX MSP Jitter / Ableton Live: Nathaniel Hartman
Metal laser cutting and Fabrication of upper portion: AllFab Inc. Columbus Ohio
Network consulting OSU: Mike Kaylor & Sandy Shew

Lessons on building and programming interactive robots using MAX MSP and Jitter and Miditron (though no longer manufactured) Arduino lessons instead.

SHOW REQUIREMENTS & DIMENSIONS

This work can be displayed in a regular darkened room with spotlights in cans to illuminate individual sculptures. Five projection screens or white walls to receive projections.  The best display space is a room 25 x 25 feet minimum size. Min ceiling height is 12 feet.

KEYWORDS

robotics, projections, futures robot, human tracking, sound, soft robotics, database

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wired Magazine Tech Art, Beyond the Beyond, by Bruce Sterling, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.
Dinmiid.com tech Art: Ken Rinaldo “Fusiform Polyphony”
Emocao Art.ficial 6.0 bienal Internacional de Arte e technologia, catalog 2013 pgs. 18, 19, 77. Coverage of Face Music robotic work
SOFTWARE CHALET.com, Music and Artificial Intelligence, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.
VIEOOZ.US, Tech Art Ken Rinaldo & Tom Hawkins, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review.
SOFTWARE CHALET.com, Music and Artificial Intelligence, March 13, 2014, Fusiform Polyphony review
The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus Company, uses lasers to build 3-D prototypes, layer by layer, By Amy Friedenberger, Sunday, September 8, 2013