Interview
Moving with a Monument: Art, Archaeology, and Artificial Intelligence Part III, The Exhibit and Future Considerations
Third in a three-part interview with roboticist Daniel Williams and master craftsperson Justin Green, collaborators on SACRFICE: Can you trust a stone? at the University of Melbourne
More and more, we interact with artificial intelligence online. For good reason, most of us are wary of those interactions. We may wonder what will come of our data, our interactions, or our creations. We may wonder whether we can believe what information we receive from AI, given its issues with “hallucination” and biases. Now, imagine those interactions in physical space. Such concrete and corporeal engagement with AI raises more questions about our trust in technology. T.D. Walker spoke with roboticist Daniel Williams and master craftsperson Justin Green, collaborators on SACRFICE: Can you trust a stone? at the University of Melbourne.
Interstellar Flight Press: To return to the initial questions that drove the project, you mention in the conference video the current state of and potential for human/robot swarm interactions in public, such as in the workplace.
Your team has taken the research from the psychology lab to the art gallery. Art makes us pay attention and makes the familiar unfamiliar. Through art, we see the world differently.
And yet, we’re also at a place where we’ll need to see the normalcy and perhaps even some comfort in robot swarms. So why did you choose to display SACRIFICE as a performance art piece at a gallery? And do you plan to continue your research in such venues?
Daniel Williams and Justin Green: As Jaques stated in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, all the world’s a stage, especially when it comes to the social interactions that play out between us in daily life. To understand how these interactions will look in more holistic and naturalistic environments, we will increasingly need to leave the laboratory setting and go out into places where people may conceivably interact with autonomous robots. Inspired by the work of practitioners such as Prof. Dana Kulić, we believe that a gallery setting offers hitherto untapped opportunities for eliciting and studying spontaneous interactions between humans and robotic systems. We are planning on continuing our investigations in this context as the field continues to unfold.
IFP: Sacrifice is a name that creates tension with the idea of trust, as you mention in the conference video. I’m curious about how your audience at the 2022 exhibition of the work reacted to both the name of the piece as well as to the experience of it?
DW & JG: We found that our visitors were rather adept at articulating their impressions of the exhibit, so we will let their comments speak for themselves.
• “I did not become a stone however I did become a Stone. The stones at the edge of the room sat there as stones usually do. The Stones in the middle of the room (after a brief period of me exploring the space) surrounded and followed me at just under arms length, moving when I did and staying still while I was.”
• “Unexpectedly I felt very moved by the swarm of moving rocks. I felt delighted by the strength of feeling”
• “A simulation of trusting or connecting with something out of our control or something we don’t fully understand.”
• “I joined a community. A swarm of creatures who were connected in their lives for a short moment.”
• “This was a VERY interesting experience. The darkness disoriented me, but also made me present in the moment. I had no expectations, but was open to the experience. It was like co-ordinate dancing. I had no idea that I would so much part of the group.”
• “I chose to be an observer, watching someone else interact with the stones. If I had been in the circle I might have hugged a stone — to see how warm or welcoming they were.”
• “It was a ritualised, contemplative place, like a church so i acted respectful. The stones moved a bit like pets so it also felt a little bit playful and i didnt know what would happen.”
• “I started to interact with them and while part of me wandered, I felt increasingly pulled to them and getting more connected to them. For some bizarre reason I spontaneously bowed to them..”
• “It felt like we were moving in concert — a ‘rock concert’ ha ha — as if taking cues from each other as dance partners. Through such synchronised non- verbal communication in a ritual space, a sense of familiarity and belonging developed. Overall a safe, fun and kind experience, beyond projections of robots as avatars.”
• “rocks formations tricking my eyes my minds high anthropo energy despite zero human presence in the space except for myself Machine zuuurrring slightly distracted but the space was open for me to walk away”
IFP: Blurring of boundaries is also central to this project. There’s the boundary between disciplines, and the boundaries between human and robot interactions. You note that you want academics to think about strict boundaries (for instance, Dr. Michałewicz asked in the conference video about whether SACRIFICE qualifies as archaeology). What do you want for the public to consider about these academic boundaries?
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And since SACRIFICE was exhibited in an art gallery, what boundaries should we as the public consider between ourselves and the world in light of our need to interact with AI-based technologies more and more often in the future?
DW & JG: This project is a genuine exploration of antidisciplinarity and the practical challenges of implementing it. As a guiding philosophy, ‘antidisciplinarity’ allows us to adopt wholeheartedly a project-led, exploratory, and non-hierarchical approach to radical collaboration. It helps us to challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries while also testing institutional limits. We continue to investigate our own involvement in the processes of building up and breaking down disciplinary siloes and to what extent these boundaries remain relevant for contemporary research activities, if at all.
Likewise, through this experience, the public is invited to reflect on the categorical walls that we build in our own lives and to explore the liminal spaces of knowledge ordinarily closed off by the heuristics we all develop for quickly reading the world. Perhaps, by breaking down disciplinary barriers and collaborating effectively with the stones, they will be able to see a way to navigate their own challenges and capitalize on any unforeseen opportunities or unexpected interactions that arise.
IFP: I’d like to end by asking what’s next for the team as a whole and as individual researchers? Has SACRIFICE opened up new questions and new spaces for inquiry for you?
DW & JG: At this point in time, most of us are continuing to distill insights from the November experience for forthcoming academic publications. On an individual level, two of us are finishing our doctoral theses, one is halfway there, one has just begun his PhD, and two are early-career postdoctoral researchers. With the project having generated such a richness of material, there is no doubt that reflections on Sacrifice will make appearances in several different formats over the coming months and years. We have stuck together because we have found this project stimulating for our other research efforts and felt that we have grown together. We hope to continue through to a second outing of the exhibit locally in February 2024, with further iterations of the experience to follow.
IFP: I’d also like to ask where this research into trust has taken your team since the 2021 presentation? And has that idea of trust shifted and deepened for you as researchers as well as members of the broader community?
DW & JG: Undoubtedly our understandings of trust have evolved over the intervening two years. Part of this evolution can be attributed to the volume of knowledge that we have come across since then, reflecting an ongoing maturation of the literature surrounding concepts of trust in our respective fields. There is also much to be said for getting a first iteration of the project into the public sphere and reading visitors’ impressions of their experiences with the swarm. Having demonstrated the relevance of a concept of trust in such situations, we are now seeking to elaborate on several attributes of trust, including how it forms, how it is lost, and its interrelation with environmental factors and other performative parameters. These insights are particularly pertinent to Daniel and Elena’s efforts to mathematically model trust-motivated human interventions and trust profiles respectively.
IFP: Also, are there plans to exhibit Sacrifice elsewhere, given that there are Science Gallery locations in other countries? Or will you exhibit further pieces farther afield?
DW & JG: We certainly intend to refine the experience so that it can travel as a self-contained exhibit suitable for installation in other galleries. To this end we have engaged interested partners both domestically and overseas through the Science Gallery network. We hope to share exciting developments in due course, however in the meantime your readers may keep up to date by visiting our website at https://robertwalton.net/project/sacrifice/.
In the first article in this series, T.D. Walker speaks with Daniel Williams and Justin Green about the SACRIFICE project beginnings and research questions, and in the second, Williams and Green explain the technical implementation of SACRIFICE.
About the Project: Sacrifice is an intimate ceremony performed with an autonomous swarm of stone-robots. Part performance, part experiment, Sacrifice is the product of a radical collaboration between University of Melbourne theatre, robotics, and archaeology specialists that invites you to interact with ancient and emerging technologies of contemplation. This performance artwork combines emerging swarm robotics and artificial intelligence technologies with globally significant ancient standing stones. It was created by artist Robert Walton, roboticists Elena Vella, Daniel Williams, Airlie Chapman and Eric Schoof, dramaturg Goran Đurić, archeologists Aleksandra Michalewicz and Tom Keep, master craftsman Justin Green, sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey. The full team can be seen here: http://robertwalton.net/project/sacrifice/
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