Whiskers and beaks, squirms and mating dances. I brought a few robots to ARTIS.
The Whiskerer is a rat re-imagined as a robot that has lingering liaisons with flowers, using its own whiskers to gently whisk them. Ziggy Dirtdust is a crooked, flesh-colored worm robot, an intergalactic space probe that has eschewed extraterrestrial travel to focus on explorations in the Earth's dirt. Nevermore-A-Matic tries to tell crows and ravens stories about the end of the world coded in wipes of its beaks. And Pidgin Smidgen is the seemingly least significant bit of a pigeon's anatomy executing the bobs and spins of the street pigeon's mating dance.
Nevermore-A-Matic was the most long in the tooth of the robots I brought to ARTIS. It has also cast its gloomy shadow at quite a few Machine Wilderness programs and events over the years. In 2016, when Theun first asked me about being part of Machine Wilderness at ARTIS we were on a bus traveling south from Kilpisjarvi, Finland where Nevermore-A-Matic had performed in Marvelous Meat, a gestural dirge in the arctic where it told its tales of the end of the world while presiding over a Franken-carcass of supermarket meats that came wrapped in plastic fascia.
Nevermore-A-Matic sends its doleful messages in human language coded in Morse code and relayed as beak wipes, a fast wipe is a dot, a slow wipe, a dash. As with a number of my projects, that the messages were thus wrapped up and rendered inscrutable and indecipherable, that the robot's attempts at communication were broadcast into a world that was largely oblivious to them, was core to the project. But the incessant beak wiping is meant to create meaning for the birds nonetheless. Beak wipes are what biologists call a displacement activity—greatly simplified as a fill-in behavior when stimuli conflict or overwhelm. Displacement activities have played a role in a few of my projects in the last decade as a way of creating meaning for non-human animals that have a theory of mind.
Notably, the existence of displacement activities was discovered by the Dutch scientist Adriaan Kortlandt and he and his discovery are honored by a bench at ARTIS because that is where indeed he did much of his work. I was therefore particularly excited for the residency at ARTIS given this historical context and the chance that Nevermore-A-Matic might encounter animals that are the great grandchildren of ones he observed in his studies. Of course, displacement activities are often exhibited—by humans and other animals alike—when we are confused by something and my robots can be confusing, ideally in an engaging way. I was pleased to see Nevermore-A-Matic elicit a lot of bemused displacement activities in the form of, for instance, scratching of the head, from the human audience at ARTIS, as well.
The Whiskerer and Pidgin Smidgen are related to one another. Not only are they meant for denizens of our built world that seemingly overlap in the human mind, rats and pigeons, respectively——but they are morphologically related. They both inherit a bit of the form of the robot taxon known as the "arm robot" which is one of the oldest industrially-significant robot types. These are the robots you can see in your mind's eye attaching windshields to cars, spray painting their bodies, welding steel frames, sorting components, deftly and swiftly moving through their tasks. The arms are all very similar to each other but at their distal end they are made different by affixing what is called an end effector: for the windshields this would have suction cups, for the painting task it would be a spray nozzle, for the welding, the tip of a welder, and for the sorting, whatever suits the sorting being done but often some sort of gripper.
End effectors are also on the arms of the celebrity robots that go off to explore other celestial bodies or the abyssal depths of the oceans, where they might also be grippers but instead designed specifically to handle rocks humans have never touched, or shovels to scoop up samples humans could never reach, or drill into the substrate to see what is below.
The end effector is the interface of the robot to the world and also representative of the boundary between the robot and what is around it.
For The Whiskerer, the end effector is some whiskers, its main way of interacting with the world. For Pidgin Smidgen, the end effector is some testicles that the robot moves through the motions of the street pigeon's mating dance. The latter is a departure from many of my robots whose intent was to communicate with an animal using that animal's own ways of communicating insofar as while the robot recreates the mating dance with decent verisimilitude, the testicles never play a role that the birds are aware of, as they are, for them, internal organs. Pidgin Smidgen is thus the right moves with the wrong parts.
At ARTIS, Pidgin Smidgen switched from a robot using its end effector to make amorous overtures to pigeons on its own behalf to an intermediary between the pigeons living in the zoo's tropical aviary under the zoo's tender care and the pigeons in its public courtyards who fend for themselves on the streets of Amsterdam.
A common theme in fairy tales is a beautiful peasant girl capturing the heart of a prince, marrying him, and living happily ever after. In the Artis Royal Zoo the pigeon prince is clearly the Victoria crown pigeon ensconced in his climate-controlled palace. But how will he find the love of his life amongst the common pigeons of Amsterdam? How, in fact, will he transcend the millions of years of differences accumulated between his species and hers since they diverged from their last common ancestor? It is a conundrum akin to finding the foot that fit Cinderella's slipper. And this first effort at ARTIS has only begun the process of finding that metaphorical foot.
In general, the extent of my robots—their corporeal reach—is confined to a body that has similar limits as organic bodies. With this project the body was instead distributed throughout the campus of zoo. One eye of the robot was a camera perched in the Tropical Aviary where it could search for the crowned pigeon and detect when he did mating dances. The computer network of the zoo became the optical nerve connecting that eye back to Pidgin Smidgen in whichever courtyard or sidewalk it sat. And then when the eye in the aviary detected a mating dance, and Pidgin Smidgen's eye detected a street pigeon in its vicinity (male or female, at this stage it can't distinguish between them), the body would execute the mating dance of the commoner pigeon, providing a link for love across material and species boundaries, hopefully attracting a pigeon Cinderella, ready to rise from her modest beginnings to the station of pigeon princess.
Notably, though, during my time at the zoo, it became rapidly clear that the most eligible royal bachelor was not a bachelor at all, and certainly not eligible. He was, in fact, seemingly in a very happy relationship with his Victoria Crown Princess. It might even be more befitting to regard them as the Pigeon King and Queen of Amsterdam given their ages. So, was what I was building as much an internet interspecies pigeon dating system, as I had imagined, or an internet escort service? Or worse, something like a pigeon Ashley Madison!
Ziggy Dirtdust is a worm robot that explores dirt, and plasticness, and dirt and plastic's relationship to one another. You'd usually find it close to the dirt, although mostly not quite touching it. ARTIS was for Ziggy a chance to look a little beyond the soil and try to commune with animals that also are quite adept explorers of the dirt, even famous, apocryphally, for burying their whole heads in it: ostriches.
The Zoodio, the on-site studio where each of us worked during our spell at ARTIS, was immediately adjacent to the home of a pair of friendly ostriches. There is an unintentional gestural and morphological similarity between Ziggy and these long-necked birds but it was also interesting to think about how our stories and adages so frequently feature a tight narrative linkage between birds and worms. Certainly, a significant number of birds are vermivores. Ostriches are omnivores so worms aren't a staple but certainly not off the menu. An introduction of Ziggy Dirtdust to the biggest of all birds seemed therefore to be something akin to an avian Goliath meeting a robotic David, but certainly without any real conflict. In fact, of course, I kept the robot at a healthy distance from the birds, for both bird and robot safety. The ostriches did seem interested, however. It remains unclear whether they saw Ziggy as a potential friend, foe, or food.
The sociologist Sherry Turkle has written a couple of times about zoos and robots. Most salient in my mind is an interaction with her daughter where the latter said it didn't matter if the animals were replaced with robots: they would probably move more and be cleaner, and it would in fact be preferable. Turkle and her husband were taken aback at the child's—and other children's— insistence that having the real thing didn't matter, the robotic representation was sufficient, and you needn't even tell the public that you had done the switch.
In a meeting room at ARTIS, there is a great collection—in the style of a cabinet of curiosities—of animal artifacts from a begotten time: bones, skulls, hides and horns. Amongst them is a taxidermied dodo bird. I imagine that, in all likelihood, the feathers used are not actually from a dodo, although I did not verify this. A taxidermied bird is the advanced simulacrum of another era i.e. akin to Turkle's imagined animatronic/robotic zoo animal simulacrum of this age. And of course it falls short. Shortcuts are taken (like using another bird's feathers) and assumptions made.
We have always made assumptions about animals based on what little we can experience of them, a prime example being the fanciful accounts of animal lives recorded in medieval bestiaries following the tradition of Aelian, Aristotle, and Pliny the Elder. Only the living animals themselves are authentically what they are and most of our assumptions about them thus far have led us astray. We wouldn't want to get to a point where all that is left of the other animals is our assumptions and memories.
A zoo is a very rich place to explore what robotic objects that cohabitate with animals, but not to audaciously attempt to replace them, can help us understand about the animals we share the planet with. A thrust of my work over the last couple of decades has indeed been that gestural objects that have bodies and behaviors more attuned to other species can help us perceive more of what those other animals truly are, make fewer assumptions, and achieve something closer to the communion that we perennially wish to have with them. Fairy tale princesses, like Cinderella, do achieve this communion in their own bodies. But those are fairy tales.