Panel Statement

Panel: SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology

The Emer­gence of Con­scious­ness pro­ject uses per­for­mance art and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in order to in­ves­ti­gate the sci­en­tific study of con­scious­ness and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of de­vel­op­ing ‘ma­chine con­scious­ness’. The pro­ject is in­spired by per­spec­tives of em­bod­i­ment as char­ac­ter­ized by Fran­cisco Varela, Evan Thomp­son and Eleanor Rosch and sit­u­at­ed­ness as ap­plied to evo­lu­tion­ary ro­bot­ics by Rod­ney Brooks. Du­mitriu, artist in res­i­dence in the Cen­tre for Com­pu­ta­tional Neu­ro­science and Ro­bot­ics at The Uni­ver­sity of Sus­sex, works with sen­sory and move­ment de­pri­va­tion (e.g. blind­folds, phys­i­cal re­straints etc.) and aug­men­ta­tion, in an at­tempt to take on the role of a ro­botic agent her­self and try to un­der­stand what it feels like to be a robot.

• Anna Du­mitriu is an artist, cur­rently Artist in Res­i­dency at the Cen­tre for Com­pu­ta­tional Neu­ro­science and Ro­bot­ics, Sus­sex Uni­ver­sity, while also un­der­tak­ing PhD stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Brighton (UK). She has ex­hib­ited and pre­sented work in a wide va­ri­ety of con­texts na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally, in­clud­ing: Whitechapel Gallery, The In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search, Brighton, Photo Bi­en­nial Fringe, Fu­turesonic, War­wick Uni­ver­sity, Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don, HTTP gallery (UK); Novorsibirsk State Mu­seum (Rus­sia), Sig­graph, New York Hall of Sci­ence, Uni­ver­sity of Florida Con­tem­po­rary Art Mu­seum (USA); ETH (Switzer­land) and STEIM (Nether­lands).  Anna Dumitriu’s work blurs the boundaries between art and science. Her installations, interventions and performances use a range of digital, biological and traditional media including live bacteria, interactive media and textiles. Her work has a strong international exhibition profile and is held in several major public collections, including the Science Museum in London. She was a member of the e-MobiLArt project (the EU funded European Mobile Lab for Interactive Art) and Artist in Residence/Visiting Research Fellow since 2007 at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University. She is known for her work as director of “The Institute of Unnecessary Research”, a group of artists and scientists whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries and critiques contemporary research practice. She is currently working on a Wellcome Trust funded art project entitled “Communicating Bacteria”, collaborating as a Vistiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence with the Adaptive Systems Research Group at The University of Hertfordshire (focussing on social robotics) and is Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence on the on the UK Clinical Research Consortium Project “Modernising Medical Microbiology”. She is a contributing editor to Leonardo Electronic Almanac.   unnecessaryresearch.tumblr.com  annadumitriu.tumblr.com  Video: HUMAN+ MY ROBOT COMPANION

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