Garnet Hertz - Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine:
Cockroach-controlled Mobile Robot
Garnet Hertz will be showing his most recent prototype: a cockroach-controlled mobile robot system. The system uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to create a semi-intelligent system, with the cockroach as the CPU. This work will be framed within the contexts of intelligence, embodiment, artificial life, the history robotics, and Michael Jackson.
Garnet Hertz is a Canadian media artist, Fulbright Scholar, and Research Fellow at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Hertz is currently developing his work under the auspices of the interdisciplinary Arts/Computation/Engineering Graduate Program at the University of California Irvine, supervised by Simon Penny.
Garnet Hertz's works are formulations in hybridity: his current projects involve the development of technology/life systems, incorporating embedded webservers, miniature cameras, robotics and living organisms into uncanny, chimeric experiments. Current theoretical interests include science, technology and society and the congruous historical/contemporary narrative of hybridity, life and embodiment.
Overview (OC Register: 18 Aug 2004)
Photo: Kevin Sullivan / Text: Tamara Chuang