[spectre] CAS March Meeting - EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE EYE OF THE ROBOT

[Paul Brown]

The BCS Computer Arts Society Specialist Group invite you to our
March meeting at the London Knowledge Lab.  This meeting is open
to the public and is free.

DATE: Wednesday 2 March, 2010
TIME: 6.30 for 7.00pm
PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS
Nearest tubes: Holborn (Central & Piccadilly Line), Russell
Square (Piccadilly Line) and Chancery Lane (Central Line).
Buses:  19, 38, 55, 243.
Map:  http://tinyurl.com/yfcvjut


EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE EYE OF THE ROBOT

Ron Chrisley and Joel Parthemore

The SEER-3 project is an attempt to explore new ways of
specifying the non-conceptual content of experience, using an
off-the-shelf robotic dog from Sony.  Much of experience is not
conceptually structured or, at least, not easily expressible in
words.  Alternate means of expressing the content of that
experience are needed.  We will offer our own perspective on that
research,  and relate it briefly to our own research interests in
philosophy of mind.

Most importantly for this audience, we will talk about our
conclusion that the program output had independent aesthetic
merit, leading us to suggest that some samples of it be submitted
to the CAS-sponsored art exhibition in Shrewsbury in 2007.
After presenting samples of what was exhibited we will also
discuss our experiences interacting with the audience there,
interacting with the exhibit.

Lastly, we will talk about the coding process as an aesthetic
experience and present examples of the program output from each
stage in the program's development.  If possible, the talk will
conclude with output of some recent work on a light-avoidance
routine.

Ron Chrisley is the Director of COGS, the Centre for Research in
Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where he holds a
Readership in Philosophy in the Department of Informatics. He has
held various research positions in Artificial Intelligence,
including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of
Birmingham and a Fulbright Fellowship at the Helsinki University
of Technology.  He was awarded his doctorate by the University of
Oxford in 1997.

Joel Parthemore is writing up his doctoral thesis on the
intersection between enactive philosophy and theories of
concepts.  The former stresses the continuity between an agent
and that agent's environment; the latter concerns the ways our
thoughts are systematically and productively structured.  He is a
student in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex
and is spending the current year at the University of Lund in
Sweden as a guest of Peter Gärdenfors, whose work on "conceptual
spaces" he is basing much of his own thesis on.   In his spare
time, he is interested in ways of bridging the art/science divide
and in the occasional aesthetically pleasing products his work
has quite unexpectedly produced.

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The CAS Spring 2010 programme continues:

6 April - Tina Gonsalves – at the London Knowledge Lab.

4 May - visit to Goldsmith’s College Maths & Art Archive
  organised by Janis Jefferies

14-16 June - Computational Aesthetics – CAe 2010 at the BCS
  co-sponsored by BCS CAS SG and Eurographics

14-16 July - Electronic Visualisation and the Arts – EVA 2010 at BCS
  sponsored by BCS CAS SG

CAS - supporting the computer arts for over 40 years
The BCS CAS SG is a British Computer Society Specialist Group

http://www.computer-arts-society.org

====
Paul Brown - based in OZ October 09 to January 2010
mailto:paul at paul-brown.com == http://www.paul-brown.com
OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
====
Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====