Our friends electric galley guide

Our Friends Electric 1 July – 10 September 2017 QUAD Gallery Artists: Alex Pearl, Anna Dumitriu + Alex May, boredomresearch (Vicky Isley + Paul Smith), Joey Holder, Kim Asendorf + Ole Fach, Stanza Our Friends Electric features artists who explore a range of themes and ideas relating to robotics, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and synthetic biology, highlighting our hopes and fears for a future that is continually shaped by technological advance. To what extent do we - will we - control this technology, these machines... and will they control us? How far can we allow A.I. to advance, and what is the scope of our duty of care?

There has been a recent glut of news reports and articles on social media networks that have focused on the idea of robots and A.I. replacing human beings in the workplace. Added to this is a latent fear involving apocalyptic scenarios where A.I. machines rebel against us; yet advances in robotics, A.I. and synthetic biological research also point to a bright future free of disease, where as we live longer our lives are made easy.

The artists gathered together for Our Friends Electric draw inspiration from front-line scientific research, taking on the role of researcher and even the guise of mad scientist, offering a creative – and emotive – understanding of the continuing moral and ethical questions that surround new and evolving technology.

Kim Asendorf + Ole Fach Digital Painting Bot by Kim Asendorf + Ole Fach playfully asks, ‘what do computers do in their spare time?’- suggesting that our synthetic creations, as they become increasingly sentient, may yearn to lead their own lives. boredomresearch (Vicky Isley + Paul Smith) Robots in Distress by boredomresearch is a single-screen projection using real-time software featuring emotionally sensitive robotic ‘agents’. These agents, crucially, can display despondency and a sense of their own demise as they go about monitoring marine habitats.

Anna Dumitriu + Alex May My Robot Companion by Anna Dumitriu + Alex May explores compelling questions relating to social robotics, asking ‘do we want and need robot companions?’ And, if so, ‘what kind of robot companions do we, as a society, want?’ Their Antisocial Swarm Robots are nine cute little bots that hate the walls of their pen, each other, and humans. Dumitriu’s 2010 performance work The Emergence of Consciousness sees the artist attempt to feel what it is like to be a robot. Reducing her sensory inputs as close to that of her robot creation ‘Mary’, Dumitriu competed to find the centre of a room using only a stick against the robots ultrasound sensors.

Joey Holder Joey Holder’s film work Ophiux suggests a future where we as humans are augmented and upgraded, ‘a future in which synthetic biology has been fully realized… and where human biology has been computer programmed’.

Alex Pearl Alex Pearl examines our relationship with machines, producing films that show his robotic creations moving towards breakdown. His low-fi film works feature age-old automata, looking back towards the birth of the very first robots.

Stanza Lost in Translation by Stanza features a custom-made robot that makes drawings, in response to a series of texts spoken by into a microphone interface. The work questions not only the meaning and interpretation of the texts (religious texts that are particularly ubiquitous) but just who controls our understanding of the outputs, questioning what indeed is ‘Lost in Translation’.