Abstract

The Cyborg Surrogate Self extends the literary/artistic notion of emotional communication into the realm of telepresence through the creation of the empathic avatar to act as a first person emotional sensor/effector. The objective of telepresence is to experience a remote location without being there, often through the use of telerobotics and communications technologies. Though suitable for remote labour, inspection and exploration, such remote experiences often lack sensory input and emotional content to make them believable as “real” experience. To provide adequate sensory input is primarily a technical challenge, however, to provide emotional content requires the projection of the feelings of the observer to connect with objects and beings at the remote site. This emotional connection may then augment sensory input provided by purely technical means. This relationship has precedents in history: 1) The everyman character in fiction, allowing the audience to project themselves into a story by visualizing themselves in everyman’s situation. 2) Astronauts in space. There are few scientific reasons to send humans to the moon, but many cultural ones. When Neil Armstrong uttered the famous words “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, the astronaut represented all of humanity. An experience of remote emotional connection requires an avatar through which a remote user may project and receive emotional content from the remote site. This avatar must afford control to the remote user, yet personify the user in order to convey feelings of empathy. Ideally this empathetic avatar would be part human, to convey emotion, and part machine, to respond to user control. This mechanically augmented human is the Cyborg Surrogate Self.

• The Centre for Metahuman Exploration, US, a multidisciplinary research collective based at Carnegie Mellon University, combines communication technology, robotics, art, and mass media to manufacture avenues of expression between people. The objective of the Centre for Metahuman Exploration is to examine and engage the aesthetic and cultural issues surrounding emerging technologies within an artistic framework. In keeping with the spirit of these technologies, the Centre articulates these issues in the public arena of interactivity. Since its inception in 1996, the Centre has produced projects in collaboration with television stations and audiences, arts festivals, prisons, and NASA. One recent project, RoverTV, enabled television viewers to remotely explore Chile’s Atacama Desert from their homes. Live imagery transmitted from a NASA robot was combined with prerecorded footage and live audio and broadcast on cable television. Viewers of this show called in to operate the robot by pushing buttons on their touch tone telephones. Viewers drove the robot through desert terrain and operated cameras on board the robot. Currently the Centre is developing the Cyborg Surrogate Self, a system designed to engage people in the sending and receiving of human will and emotion to remote sites. An example of this, called “Petting Zoo”, was recently exhibited at the Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art. “Petting Zoo” patrons telepresently controlled a human arm in order to pet a living bunny rabbit. Centre members are from various fields, including art, architecture, robotics, cognitive science, and television. Research interests include the shaping of the human through the machine, and the shaping of the machine through the human.   clodd.it/01CdRom/_MirArtInSpace/artis.htm