electric dreams, brainwave, exit art, sleep waking

Robot Will Do Interpretive Dance Based on Your Dreams

Technology has finally reached its zenith, and now we can all pack up and go home. After all, where can you go after someone has created a robot that performs interpretative dance routines based upon your dreams? Yes, you read that right: Someone has created a robot that will recreate your sleep experiences in its own form of interpretative dance. How could you not want to find out what the hell that's about?

Artist Fernando Orellana and Computer Science professor Brendan Burns have teamed up to create Sleep Waking, a project starring a robot using information recorded during patients' sleep - including brainwave activity and eye movement - to chose from a number of pre-programmed "robot behaviors" and movements and create a gestural "playback" of sleep experiences. Orellana has high hopes for the project:

Sleep Waking is a metaphor for a reality that could be in our future... [R]obots are increasingly used to augment human experience. From robotic prosthetic devices, personalized web presences, and implanted RFID chips, technology is moving from being an externalized tool, to being a literal extension of who we are. By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means.

If you're in New York, you can see Sleep Waking for yourself as part of the current Brainwave: Common Senses exhibition at Exit Art, running until April 19th. The rest of us will just have to be happy with this video:

Sleep Waking [Fernando Orellana.com]

9:20 AM on Thu Feb 21 2008
By Graeme McMillan
1,031 views
9 comments

Comments

braak at 09:29 AM on 02/21/08
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Connectedness Index: 990

Oh. Thank god.
Slatz_Grobnik at 09:57 AM on 02/21/08
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By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means.

...through a dancing robot.

Next up, a twelve foot phallus made of Styrofoam, recycled from cups out of church brunches, to draw attention to the failure of welfare reform.
Wesman at 10:15 AM on 02/21/08
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What happens if you dream of violating Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? Or electric sheep?
Wesman at 10:16 AM on 02/21/08
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Dream of electric sheep, that is, not violate them.
NefariousNewt at 10:19 AM on 02/21/08
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Connectedness Index: 695

I suspect if it did it to my dreams, it would look like it was having a seizure.
ideaman2020 at 10:25 AM on 02/21/08
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@Wesman: Is it wrong to dream about violating electric sheep..?
Ourobolus at 11:01 AM on 02/21/08
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Oh, this is great, just what we need. Robots that can not only read our minds, but can dance (presumably) evocatively?

I sense the robotic stripper movement to be right around the corner. No longer will I have to bring in a 20-page paper to the strip joint detailing exactly what I want in a lap dance.
Oxfordian at 11:22 AM on 02/21/08
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I was expecting some funky 'bot moves; instead I got a droid on 'shrooms . . .
Katana_Mind at 06:30 AM on 02/22/08
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Y'know, one would think that watching interpretive dance performed by a friggin' robot would make all that intense posturing enjoyable....but, y'know what?
It's not!