Conceptual artist Ken Goldberg is considered a pioneer in the growing genre of Internet art. A professor of industrial engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, Goldberg combines his skill in robotics and his fascination with the social behavior of Internet communities. The result is a series of whimsical artistic experiments in which strangers use the Internet to jointly control and monitor real-life events and activities. In the Spark episode “Technophiles,” join Goldberg as he explains several of his pioneering works in the emerging field of Internet and tele robotic art.
On selected Fridays at noon, Goldberg and his students organize a game of Tele-Twister at the Alpha Lab at U.C. Berkeley. As in the original Twister game, Tele-Twister participants contort their bodies in order to place their hands and feet on colored dots — except in this version, remote players log in via the Internet and collectively decide how the participants move.
Goldberg began experimenting with using machines to make art while completing a Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1980s. For the installation “Power and Water,” in 1992, Goldberg and his students at the University of Southern California built a robot programmed to paint on large paper during the exhibition. Because the piece combined robotics and painting — a medium usually associated with a unique style produced through an artist’s hand — “Power and Water” raised many questions about the uniqueness, authenticity and even authorship of art.
Though the exhibition had been well attended, Goldberg was frustrated with the limited audience reached through a gallery show. So in 1994, with the emergence and widespread popularization of the Internet, Goldberg assembled the first tele-robot in a work called “Mercury Project,” an interactive online scavenger hunt. The work reached an audience unimaginable in a gallery context, receiving more than 2.5 million hits in the seven months it remained online.
Goldberg’s next project, “Telegarden,” which is still online and offers participants use of a robot to tend and monitor a remote garden. There are no behavioral restrictions on the project; however, participants are never entirely sure whether others are watching them or not. In this way, “Telegarden” is concerned with the behavior of users who are aware that they may become objects of scrutiny.
In the vein of “Telegarden” and in time for the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement in October (2004), Goldberg’s team launched another webcam project. In the “Demonstrate” project, the camera provides a 360-degree view of the activities at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, a location which has been traditionally used for political demonstrations and rallies. This installation is implemented by using advanced networked robotic camera, a visual database, and a mathematical model of socio-ocular behavior. The Web site can handle up to twenty simultaneous users and allows each user to zoom into the scene and to take still photographs.
Since 1995, Goldberg has been teaching computer science at U.C. Berkeley, where he also co-founded the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium. His artwork has been shown internationally at Ars Electronica in Austria, ZKM in Germany, Pompidou Center in France, Tokyo ICC Biennale, Artists Space, the Kitchen, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Biennial (2000).
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