Our Dreams Change, We Don't by Jasia Reichardt

Our Dreams Change, We Don’t Jasia Reichardt

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL International Lecture Series

Our Dreams Change, We Don’t Jasia Reichardt

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL International Lecture Series 13 December 2017

2

Introduction Frédéric Migayrou

Throughout her long career, Jasia Reichardt has arguably redefined the role of the art critic by taking an actively intellectual position in the production of art. She has challenged the traditional task of curating by repositioning the exhibition space as an interdisciplinary platform and a site of production in itself.

Reichardt’s articles such as ‘Machines as Art’ (1987) and her books The Computer in Art (1971), Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction (1978) and most significantly Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (1971), interrogate the many interactions between art and technology. They are deeply engaged with a global critical approach, echoing the concerns of our time.

Cybernetics and computation emerged into the British architectural context of the 1960s still marked by events such as the 1951 Festival of Britain and the intense activity of art collectives such as the Independent Group.

Cybernetics, with its modelling of complex systems, presented an antidote to the end of the art object posited by post-Duchampian debates, especially through the writing of Richard Hamilton and in the critical position of John McHale on technology and the media.

The propositions of McHale – such as the

extension of the augmented capacities of man through technologies (which he called ‘Man +’) and the proposal for ‘new symbiosis’ in his book The Future of the Future (1969) – began a stream of thought which was developed and extended through exhibitions and publications by Reichardt. She was appointed Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, in 1963. Her first exhibition, Between Poetry and Painting (1965), on concrete poetry, was influenced by the research of the Stuttgart Group and Max Bense, and particularly by their experiments on seriality, cybernetics and information aesthetics.

Beginning work in 1965 on her seminal project Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), Reichardt embraced transdisciplinarity by exploring the breadth of possibilities offered by new developments in computation and communication. Going beyond a positivist understanding of the use of technology, as well as the invasive problematics of cybernetics after Norbert Wiener, and rather following the notion of the homeostat as defined by W. Ross Ashby in the 1940s, she interrogated the rich diversity of artistic practices in the field, and the possibilities for interactions between technical and living systems.

3

As well as being the first exhibition on computation and art, Cybernetic Serendipity introduced the philosophical field of aesthetics to new ways of thinking about art, in which notions like input, output, feedback, control and learning redefined creative and scientific possibilities. Alongside an assembly of major researchers prefiguring the development of artificial intelligence (such as Stafford Beer, Warren McCulloch, Donald Michie and Seymour Papert), she convened the major characters of the avant-garde, including John Cage, Alison Knowles, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Nam June Paik, Gordon Pask, Nicolas Schöffer and Iannis Xenakis. By defining the making of art as a process of complex systems, Reichardt marked out a domain where art could find a prescriptive role, a vision which resonates today with the ways AI, deep learning, and neural networks have penetrated our daily lives.

She is the only critic among her contemporaries who brought art face-to-face with what the philosopher Ernst von Glasersfeld described as ‘radical constructivism’: in short, the idea that all knowledge is constructed rather than sensed or perceived. From this theoretical position, Reichardt continued to broaden her visionary research while carrying out intense activity as an art critic with exhibitions including

Fluorescent Chrysanthemum (1968), celebrating graphic culture in Japan; and Play Orbit (1969), exploring the participatory nature of toys.

She was appointed Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in 1974, and more recent exhibitions include Electronically Yours (1998) and Nearly Human (2015) which forced the viewer to confront their ‘post-human’ condition.

It is impossible in so short an introduction to summarise Reichardt’s career and influence.

Her contributions to the understanding and preservation of the critical functions of art and hermeneutics deserve extensive analysis.

But in this short volume, the first in its series transcribing public lectures at The Bartlett School of Architecture, I hope you will experience a sense of both the breadth and the relevance of her work, and of the refreshing perspective her approach still has today.

Frédéric Migayrou is Chair and Bartlett Professor of The Bartlett School of Architecture.

4

Our Dreams Change, We Don’t Jasia Reichardt “Time and society provide us with images of the world. Each generation takes the image and changes it, a bit, or a lot.

Our images undergo greater changes than we do ourselves.

Today, I shall talk about three such changing image types: those of home, machines and the future...”

Opposite: ‘Animate Face Robot’ (AFR), 1993, with the mask of a young woman. Developed by Fumio Hara and Hiroshi Kobayashi. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo. Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

5

6

[1] Part 1: HOME One of the most important images, close to our hearts, is the home.

[2] My example today is a very small home, it is just a room – an ideal room for one person.

In 1932, Architectural Review published an article by Oliver P. Bernard, architect and industrial designer. His subject was the project for a one-room flat designed in 1684 by the Dutch hydraulic engineer, Cornelis Meyer.

1

2

3

Originally, Meyer’s drawings were published in Italy in a book. Most of them dealt with the rebuilding of Rome, but somehow this room was included. We don’t know how big the room was to be, but Meyer made detailed illustrations of its four walls, and numbered and annotated everything in the room. First wall: no.6: a cupboard for books (there are several of these); no.11 is a tube for listening to conversations in another room; no.12 shows a similar tube for speaking to others without leaving the room, and without being overheard by those around, and a tube for calling from afar; no.14 (the door in the centre) is for hens, which enter from the garden and lay eggs in the room without inconveniencing anyone.

[3] Second wall, no.31: the camera obscura for seeing who passes in the street without leaving one’s bed (the bed, number 22, is in the centre); no.37: cupboard for holding silver basins and decanters.

[4] Third wall, no.49: spy-glass made with a concave mirror to observe who passes in the street; no.53: a cage for birds.

[5] Fourth wall, no.70: chair for resting during the day, with tapestry above to divide the room into four parts; no.76: a table for cleaning and sharpening knives; no.82 is a washing-up device that does not leak…This is discreet, so wellengineered that I couldn’t find it in the picture.

This room has everything that one could desire.

Its owner, obviously a bachelor, has everything conveniently placed. It is an ideal one-room flat for one person. Every need is catered for.

4

7

The one-room flat has certain similarities with something we are more familiar with, [6] the smartphone, which also attempts to answer all the needs of one person. Like the room, it is private, it is not shared. It is small but allows access beyond its confines in every direction.

The camera obscura of the room is now the camera. The tube for listening to conversations is now the phone.

5

6

7

8

Virtual reality at large may be our world today, but this small electronic object is our home with our address book, music, books and photographs. These are possessions and treasures of one person.

[7] The first wall of the 17th-century one-room flat provides a nest for a little dog (number 20).

The number is so small it is difficult to find.

The dog must be very small too. So far, mobile animal companions are limited, but perhaps it is only a question of time before the smartphone includes a digital pet developed by a neural network and synthesised from the net. That would be a real improvement on the Tamagotchi, which arrived on the scene in 1996 and required nursing, playing with and disciplining, all done by pressing buttons. Neglect by the owner was punished with increasingly loud squeaks and other, less friendly, noises at all times of day or night. Each new smartphone can be trusted to add something to enhance and improve our lives. Next time it might be a dog like this one, [8] I hope so.

The notion of privacy is today as important with the mobile phone as it was for the occupant of the one-room flat, where even the hens were unobtrusive, and where the occupant could observe the world outside without being observed himself.

8

9

10

11

In 1985, I went to a design school in the Dominican Republic to run a course about the idea of what a home is, or what it could be.

At the end of the week, I asked each student to make a model of their ideal home and to photograph it against a real background of nature or a town, [9] so that in a slide it might look convincingly like a real building. Here are four examples. The students were also asked to describe this ideal home in words. Most of their descriptions included two basic requirements: one was that nature should encroach into the interior (in the Caribbean, perhaps this is not surprising), but what did surprise me was the second requirement: that the home would be occupied by each student alone, whatever its size. Visitors, I was told when I insisted, would be welcome, but the students wanted to live alone.

[10] Another example of a home for one person is found in a children’s book by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson published in 1938.

This is Mr Rouse Builds His House, or in the original, Pan Tom buduje dom. In it, Pan Tom wants a small house with a red-tiled roof, a balcony with flowers and a garden with a tree.

When he goes to an architect to select a design he is shown various possibilities, including: [11] houses for a snail, a mole, a bird, and a house on stilts. No, obviously these won’t do. Once the house he desires is agreed [12] (here it is, in the centre of the book jacket), the construction takes some time. The interior must be painted, water has to be connected and electricity installed. He also needs a clock to tell the time, to be sure that the restaurant he goes to for breakfast will be open. There is no mention of other occupants, there are no guests – and there is no kitchen. Like the ideal 17th-century room and like the smartphone, it too would be a private space for one person.

So what’s new? In a way, nothing: everyone wants their ideal home to suit them and nobody else, only today the home can be in our pocket. The new ‘home’ – the phone – is a small machine, and is one of a number of machines that we depend on for nearly everything. And so, part two of my talk is about machines, specifically those that have become the subject of art and the means of making it. [13]

12

9

13

10

14

15

11

16

17

18

Part 2 It took twenty years for André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, which he wrote about in 1947, to become a reality. The Musée Imaginaire was to be a museum of reproductions – a museum of unlimited images in unlimited editions. Malraux, of course, did not realise the consequences of his dream, which we live with today. He couldn’t have imagined that a day would come when there could be more art than bread; that one day nearly everybody could be an artist in the sense that he or she would have the means to make still and moving pictures ad infinitum.

The artist might be asleep while the machine would go on producing images in programmed variations. Nor could Malraux have anticipated that one day we might be unsure what art is.

Some machines, of course, are (or we think are) works of art. [14] Among these are the robots of Bruce Lacey, which are operated by remote control. ‘Rosa Bosom’, on the left, is a ‘radiooperated simulated actress’. She occasionally slapped her enormous red lips into visitors’ faces, by way of welcoming people to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in London in 1968 (that is the year I want to talk about for a while). ‘Mate’, on the right, is a more modest robot who just followed Rosa Bosom around.

[15] ‘Robot K-456’ by Nam June Paik was a female robot, who functioned very occasionally, moving with an unsteady gait through the exhibition. [16] Most of the time, she (and yes it was a ‘she’) stood quietly next to a child’s drawing of a robot. ‘K-456’ was a famous robot. I say was, because a few years later, [17] she was run over by a car on 6th Avenue in New York. Who knows why Nam June Paik permitted this to happen, but for a short time it was the talk of the town and the event was televised and reported in the news.

[18] One of the most popular works in the exhibition was ‘SAM’ (Sound Activated Mobile) by Edward Ihnatowicz. Its head was like a flower on top of an articulated spine of polished aluminium vertebrae. Microphones, fixed like stamens in the centre of the flower, picked up ambient sounds of certain frequencies and elicited a range of responses. SAM turned towards the source of quiet sound in an attitude of attentive listening.

Children were very good at modulating their voices but adults tended to be embarrassed by the idea of talking to a machine and talked too loudly for SAM to respond.

12

Having been able to communicate with SAM, children would then approach another robot, [19] without realising its limitations. ‘Albert’,

by John Billingsley, did very little. He turned his head occasionally, at random, in one direction or another and that was it. And yet people talked to him, hoping to elicit a response.

19

The animation of the inanimate, and the desire to communicate with machines, represent both our dreams and our limitations.

[20] And so I come to some other robots by Bruce Lacey which were not in the exhibition but which emphasise this point. In 1968, Lacey wrote some notes entitled ‘On the human predicament’: ‘Given a brain, man has the possibility of developing into a sublime, happy, creative, and unique creature, but he is prevented from realising this potential by the severe limitations imposed on him by the environment he has created for himself in order to survive physically… In my robots and humanoids I attempt to present this predicament, in my events I attempt to ask questions, and in my simulations and environments I attempt to point towards the answer. In attempting to solve these problems I use all advances in technology, electronics, psychology, market research, medicine and mathematics at my disposal. Using, in fact, the very hardware that has brought about these problems in the first place.’1 Bruce Lacey made robots that warned us about the future and about being victimised by those in power. His robots commented on both their predicament and ours. This [21] is ‘Superman 2963’. Lacey said about him: ‘Man’s obsession with the machine as being the God that can give him more leisure time is symbolised in this construction. This is a man who has been de-humanised by the machine and has become in fact a machine himself. Now, he just performs a few simple operations designed to make him feel he is still human.’ 2

21

13

20

14

22

15

[22] This robot with a belisha beacon for a head, entitled ‘Boy, Oh Boy Am I Living’, looks quite happy. All the robot can do is to move its leg up and down, but the government is sending him happy thoughts and so he believes that he is still a fully functioning human.

The late 1960s, when Bruce Lacey was making these robots, was not generally a time of cynicism: on the contrary, it was a time of optimism about technology. The London-based magazine, Running Man, whose subject was revolution, published this San Francisco Digger Poem, next to an image of a contemporary computer: [23] All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labours and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.3

23

So that was 1968.

Fifty years on, everywhere we are watched by machines and it has little to do with ‘loving grace’.

Part 3, ‘The Future’…that’s not an easy subject.

In 1881 Oscar Wilde wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘It is a fact that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there.

Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.’ 4 Siegfried Giedion, Swiss historian and critic of architecture, writing 57 years later in 1948, saw it differently: ‘Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery. But the promises of a better life have not been kept.

All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organise the world, or even to organise ourselves. Future generations will perhaps designate this period as one of mechanised barbarism, the most repulsive of all’.5 Is mechanisation value-free? Can it really be neutral? Or, is it another apple for Eve to offer to Adam?

16

24

25

17

[24] We no longer depict machines as fantasies for the future, equivalent to this 19th-century image of the floor-scrubbing machine for the year 2000, because the majority of our fantasies of the past have arrived, or are on the drawing board. Machines are now our indoor nature.

Will they eventually also replace the landscape?

26

27

Even so, we are not frightened, the future absorbs us.

We realise, of course, that prediction does not work, but we still want to know.

There have always been interesting views of how things might turn out. In 1925, George Routledge & Sons published a book called The Future by Archibald Montgomery Low [25], a research scientist and a prolific writer.

During his life, Professor Low made a great many discoveries, including a method of transmitting images by wire; and among his numerous predictions were the portable telephone and space stations. In this book, he introduces a chapter on invention, which includes [26] this picture, and declares that ‘invention is the offspring of science and art; it is in the science of the continuity of thought that invention and civilisation become one’.

This drawing is called, ‘A Quiet Lunch at Home’.

The main occupation of the man, once he has finished feeding from the tube, is watching television – a flat wall-sized screen, and to communicate with the aid of the machine on the right marked A, with ‘the Outer World, Other Planets, the Future, and Women’. The child’s helmet has no contemporary equivalent, although it could be Low’s invention for listening to music or a virtual reality headset. The child is playing with an electric cat, that is not so distant from Sony dog Aibo, but there is a mouse instead of a ball. Or, our Pleo [27], and other toys that today appear to respond with emotions, copying the behaviour of real or extinct animals. [Pleo, here, is a small dinosaur.

His encounter with a dog was an artist’s speculation]. By and large Professor Low was exceptionally prescient.

18

28

19

Today, our desire for a relationship with machines assumes, or can assume, three forms. One: it could be a relationship with friendly machines that we want to, or need to, communicate with; two: a relationship with machines that become a part of us, and/or three: a relationship with machines that become us.

29

30

31

There are, by now, quite a few robots mimicking human expressions and behaviour, intended to improve our relationship with machines. Most of these robots are female, although I have heard of a male robot called Julian declare with some conviction on YouTube: ‘I love you deeply, as deeply as synthetic intelligence can.’ We don’t know, of course, whom he was addressing.

One of the earliest prototype face robots was made by Professor Fumio Hara with colleagues and students at the Tokyo University of Science during the 1990s. Hara was one of the first to work on the expression and recognition of emotions. [28] This is what the robot looks like without its covering skin. It is called an Animate Face Robot (AFR) and the face is that of a young woman. [29] Her face is capable of expressing six basic emotions: surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness and sadness. The idea is also for her to convey the subtler emotions in-between. Since facial expressions are responsible for over half of our communication with one another, the purpose of Fumio Hara’s work is to facilitate communication between robot and human.

[30] The robot, which consists solely of a head and neck, can also interpret facial expressions in humans and respond appropriately with its own. [31] Her ultimate purpose may be a practical one but her very presence, as in many other experiments in science and technology, appears to belong to the domain of art.

Artists and scientists make use of the same technologies and the same materials. And, like the scientist, the artist today is less concerned with aesthetic problems than with discovering and inventing new realities.

But could we go a step further? Could we in our conscious state choose to incorporate the machine into our own body? Could it be that our awareness of the machine’s limitations is gradually dissolving?

20

32

33

21

[32] Some thirty years ago, the artist Stelarc astonished his audience and the internet community with his latest performance. With medical circuitry implants in his body he was wired via the internet to a number of computers throughout the world. By using a touchscreen, visitors to centres where these computers were available – Media Lab in Helsinki, Centre Pompidou in Paris and several others – could manipulate Stelarc’s movements by remote control. People watching the performance may have been disturbed, Stelarc was not.

He referred to the event as a metaphysical experience of watching his limbs move without his intention. [33] Involuntary Body, he called it.

But what may seem unsatisfactory about this experiment is that neither Stelarc nor his choreographers could know who, which individual, was actually responsible for the movements of his body. This applies to much interactive art, when several people are engaged simultaneously in manipulating a single programme or a single machine. The participants cannot know whether their action is responsible for the effect they witness. [34] The case with Stelarc’s third arm, of course, is different because it is the electrical impulses

34

22

of his muscles that cause it to do whatever it does.

Combining computer chips with the human nervous system is not common, not yet. Nor are there many artists seeking such an intimate relationship with the machine. Stelarc doesn’t see people being taken over by Cyborgs. It is more likely, he would say, that the body will swallow the machine. ls the machine part of us, or are we part of it?

‘Every epoch chooses its own definition of man’, as Octavio Paz is reputed to have said, suggesting that humans are principally transmitters of symbols and signs. That was about 80 years ago. If the artist Adriene Jenik and the Particle Group in Southern California are anything to go by, we have now moved beyond a world of signs and symbols. They look ahead to 2030. Their installations explore the possibility that with nanotechnology, the boundaries between humans and machines must fade. They are

already concerned with the machine that becomes us. Nanoparticles can be manipulated and can manipulate. In their 2008 exhibition, Particles of Interest, the Particle Group contemplated the dangers of dematerialisation.

For obvious reasons I cannot show you a picture: their exhibition was, by definition, largely invisible.6 We do not have senses enough to recognise nanoparticle manipulations of us, or by us. Once we consider these possibilities to be serious, and it may already be too late to do so, then the definition of cybernetics will require several more paragraphs in the dictionary.

[35] The Particle Group are stepping into a region that is no less fantastic than Alice’s excursion through the looking glass, but her familiar Wonderland pales beside the vistas opened up by nanotechnology. My question is: Would today’s Alice return from her travels?

Or, would she want to?

35

23

Jasia Reichardt (b. 1933, Warsaw, Poland), is a writer, editor and curator. She is interested in the intersections of art and other fields, including science, literature and technology.

Reichardt arrived in the UK at the age of 12 under the care of her aunt and uncle, the avant-garde artists and writers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. She grew up in north London. During the 1950s she was assistant editor of the arts magazine Art News and Review. From 1963 to 1971 she was assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She curated the first major international exhibition on computer art, Cybernetic Serendipity, at the ICA in 1968.

She went on to direct the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1974 to 1976. She taught for many years, including ten at the Architectural Association, and from 1989 to 1998 was director of ARTEC Biennale in Japan. She has also spent many years working on the Themerson Archive.

The lecture transcribed here took place on 13 December 2017 at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, as part of the school’s International Lecture Series.

24 Notes 1 Bruce Lacey, personal correspondence with Jasia Reichardt, 1968 2 Bruce Lacey, personal correspondence with Jasia Reichardt, 1968 3 Richard Brautigan, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ originally published in All Watched Over

by Machines of Loving Grace (Communication Company, 1967) 4 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891) in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 2003) pp. 1174-1197 5 Sigfried Giedion, ‘Man in Equipoise’ in Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) 6 Particles of Interest by Particle Group took place at Gallery@Calit2, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, La Jolla, 6 August – 3 October 2008.

Images 1 Ideal home for one person. Cover Image of Die Birnen von Ribbeck by Friedrich Christian Delius, Rowohlt Verlag, 1991.

2-5 The four walls of a one-room apartment designed

by Dutch hydraulic engineer Cornellis Meyer. In ‘Del Fabricar Commodo’, Nuovi Ritrovamenti, 1689. ETH Bibliothek e-rara collection.

6 A modern one-room space illustrated with an Apple iPhone 3G: individual and private.

7 Detail of a nest located in the first wall of Cornellis Meyer’s one-room apartment. In ‘Del Fabricar Commodo’, Nuovi Ritrovamenti, 1689. ETH Bibliothek e-rara collection.

8 The missing smartphone app: a pet. Collage by Nick Wadley.

9 ‘Ideal homes’ designed by students of the Altos de Chavón Design School in the Dominican Republic during a one-week workshop led by Jasia Reichardt in 1985.

Photos by Jasia Reichardt.

10 Covers of Pan Tom buduje dom by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, first published in 1938. Themerson Estate.

11 Illustrations included in Pan Tom buduje dom by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, first published in 1938. Themerson Estate.

12 Dust jacket of Mr Rouse Builds His House, the English version of Pan Tom buduje dom by Stefan Themerson and Barbara Wright, Gaberbocchus Press Limited.

Themerson Estate.

13 John Heartfield, ‘Rationalisation is on the March’, photomontage for Der Knippel, no.2, February 1927.

Courtesy of John J Heartfield.

14 Bruce Lacey, ‘Rosa Bosom and her mate’, 1965.

Displayed at the exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, 1968.

Photo courtesy of Jasia Reichardt.

15 Nam June Paik, ‘Robot K-456’, 1965. Displayed at ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’. Nam June Paik Estate.

16 Picture of Robot K-456 standing next to a child’s drawing of a robot. Displayed at ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’.

Nam June Paik Estate.

17 Stills from a video showing Robot K-456 being run over a car on 6th Avenue in New York, 1971.

Nam June Paik Estate.

18 Edward Ihnatowicz, ‘Robot SAM’ (Sound Activated Mobile), 1968. Displayed at ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’.

Image courtesy of Richard Ihnatowicz.

19 John Billingsley, ‘Robot Albert’, 1967. Displayed at ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’. Image courtesy of John Billingsley.

20 Portrait of Bruce Lacey. Photo courtesy of Jasia Reichardt.

21 Bruce Lacey, Superman 2963. Photo courtesy of Jasia Reichardt.

22 Bruce Lacey, Robot ‘Oh Boy, Oh Boy Am I Living’.

Photo courtesy of Jasia Reichardt.

23 San Francisco Digger Poem, published in the magazine Running Man: Ecstatic Revolution, Special Issue 3/4/5, 1968. Collage by Nick Wadley.

24 Jean Marc Côté, ‘Electric Scrubbing’. One of the 19th-century images predicting what the year 2000 would look like. Wikimedia Commons.

25 Depiction of a station in A.M. Low, The Future.

George Routledge & Sons, 1925.

26 ‘A Quiet Lunch at Home’, in A.M. Low, The Future.

George Routledge & Sons, 1925.

27 Pleo Robot and a dog. Collage by Nick Wadley.

28 ‘Animate Face Robot’ (AFR), 1993. Developed by Fumio Hara and Hiroshi Kobayashi. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo. Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

29 Facial expressions of the AFR with the mask of a young woman. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo. Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

30 Portraits of AFR. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo. Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

31 Portrait of AFR. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo. Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

32 Stelarc, ‘Ping Body’, 1996. An internet-actuated and uploaded performance. Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh. Image courtesy of Stelarc.

33 Stelarc, ‘Third Hand’, 1980. Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya.

Photographer: Simon Hunter. Image courtesy of Stelarc.

34 Stelarc, ‘Handswriting’, 1982. Writing one word simultaneously with three hands. Maki Gallery, Tokyo.

Photo: Keisuke Oki. Image courtesy of Stelarc.

35 Alice stepping through the screen. Collage by Nick Wadley.

Thanks to Nick Wadley for additional illustrations.

Cover image: ‘Animate Face Robot’ (AFR), 1993. Developed

by Fumio Hara and Hiroshi Kobayashi. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Science University of Tokyo.

Image courtesy of Hiroshi Kobayashi.

ucl.ac.uk/architecture Find us on Jasia Reichardt’s International Lecture Series lecture, ‘Our Dreams Change, We Don’t’, was given at UCL on 13 December 2017.

Publisher The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Editor Laura Cherry Editorial Assistant Marcela Aragüez Graphic Design Patrick Morrissey, Unlimited weareunlimited.co.uk © 2019 The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the authors. Works © the artists named.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

We endeavour to ensure all information and image acknowledgements contained in this publication are accurate at the time of printing.

ISBN 978-1-9996285-3-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-9996285-4-3 (pdf) The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB +44 (0)20 3108 9646 architecture@ucl.ac.uk

The Bartlett International Lecture Series was generously supported by Fletcher Priest Architects.

ucl.ac.uk/architecture