An autonomous robot rolls across the beach. Though it might stop moving, its sensors haven’t stopped taking in information about its surrounding environment: the waves, the wind, the sounds of people and animals both near and far. It begins to move again, scratching a poem into the sand.
This is Poet on the Shore by multidisciplinary designer Yuxi Liu:
Empowered by machine learning, it can discover the patterns, and create associations in its mind. Furthermore, it translates these perceptions into poems and write them on the beach. The robot, thus, is able to have multisensory experiences and present a kind of poetic sensibility. It has autonomy such that its behaviour does not require the intervention of humans. As a result, it does not need to demonstrate its value through serving human needs. Rather, its perceptions give its existence value. It also intervenes in the world. These interventions, expressed through the kinetic and poetic gesture, reveal its non-utilitarian existence: the verses it writes will eventually be washed away by the waves or wind.
Related play: AI experiments with Google.
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via Designboom.
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