Random International

0:12Hi my name is dev and I am head of technology at random international thank you very much for having me.

0:21So I've been with random for seven years now. And in that time we have made it rain inside made it rain outside printed disappearing portraits walked with robots built clocks that don't tell the time made mirrors look back at their viewers installed illuminated intelligence on the side of a train station and a bunch of other stuff that I won't go into now.

0:45But it's a very wide gamut of stuff that we like to play with studio was founded in 2005 by Hannah's and flora Norcross and we are now a much larger multidisciplinary team based in glorious Balan and as a studio we explore the human condition in an increasingly mechanized world by building works that discuss collective behavior and the behavior of objects as well as autonomy and control today I would like to talk about our latest project zoological so zoological is a the videos right yeah zoological is a flock of autonomous flying spheres that move collectively they react to their surroundings and sometimes to the people within their environment the orbs decision making progress process exists in software there is no human pilot and the piece was informed by a desire to explore some of the implications of cohabiting with autonomous machines and a world increasingly driven by algorithms and invisible computing so let's talk about how it works in principle the scale and nature of the movement that the orbs exhibit elicit a strong kinesthetic response in the viewer that is to say that the speed and size and color and shape are familiar enough that you get it but not so familiar that you're comfortable with it you see what I mean I mean at its base it's a bunch of shapes moving around right like and we as people paint meaning onto them rather than them giving us meaning or having any particular actual intent and this is a principle actually appears a lot in the studio's work and like it speaks very directly to your lizard brain you know like the ancient and primeval amygdala that sits like down here somewhere.

2:53And it controls all the things like fight and flight or fear you know all the instincts that are essential to sort of survival and adaptation and making sure that something doesn't eat you and that kind of thing. And this is something that has been around for I mean like as long as we have been around as a species you know it's not a new thing Heider and Simmel 1944 animation from a study of apparent behavior but he puts a pin on it it is a 90 second clip of some triangles moving around right.

3:23But it's impossible to watch this and not attached or ascribe meaning to what's going on like it's a big triangle and it hits the small triangle and then the circle is hiding inside it you know like that's not happening that's not happening it's just shapes but that's what you think because that's what people do you know like so this is how this project works like we move these things around and then we make you feel like something is happening right ah anyway.

3:53So that's on YouTube if you wanna go find it in practice this project is the sum of many many many parts as randoms technology group which is my team and the wider random team and then the orb specialist so actually fabricate these impossibly delicate objects and the tracking specialists to keep them in the air reliably and then there's like roundhouses production along with additional team and the Roundhouse technical team and Lucy Carter who did the lighting and Wayne McGregor who's like amazing and the dances and what records and Mark Pritchard and the Royal Ballet and on and on and on this list goes and for me it's like a real pleasure to interact with these people on a project like this.

4:37And it's like a real privilege to get to work with them because it really elevates a project like this to something that is more than the sum of its constituent parts so architectural II like technically architectural II the piece has got a higher brain and a lower brain and so the higher brain is watching people in the space and deciding what to do with that information all the time like go here do that be on top of this person that kind of stuff right.

5:08And then that communicates that system communicates with a separate brain which is watching only the orbs right and maintaining their positions in time and space and monitoring their health and informing them more explicitly what to do like flight vectoring and this kind of thing in terms of the life cycle of a project you know we go from sketches on paper like this maybe and then you get to go to the Roundhouse for the afternoon and play with balloons which was fun and then from there you know you get a real idea of the physicality of the thing.

5:38And then you start to sketch in 3d you know and you start to iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate until you start to get something that resembles the thing that you. Actually imagined in the first place you know getting close now no closer so because like there's a million reasons why this this entire project shouldn't work right like changes in the weather mean that this project shouldn't work like changes in the weather make the orbs lighter or heavier which affects the flight time which affects the tracking accuracy which affects how much helium they lose which affects whether they stay in the air or not and so on.

6:21And so on like and even the difference between a sunny morning and a rainy afternoon which by the way is every day in August because UK right is enough to throw the Boise like completely out. And it just sort of falls over so and like we know this. And we just have to react to it rather than doing anything about it in the first place and then even more complexity than that like the system isn't totally deterministic like we don't know what the software brain is going to do we don't know what the people are going to do like people like trying to punch orbs which is bad or they lie down which makes them invisible to the tracking system and we had no idea that people were gonna do this they just they just lie down like and it's really interesting to see that how is really great you know.

7:05And then we have to you've got the actual like people logistics of things like how do you keep these things in the air continuously like they got a fly dock charge change flying so on. And so on.

7:13And so on II got seven of them you got a manager spares it's not straightforward you know we're running for ten hours a day for a month and like we didn't know if it was gonna last that long because we didn't have a month to test it for a month of what we tried it for a month so risky but you know what it works like it works we brought it down today. And we made it all the way through and everything is fine and we didn't like something you know we've topped it all it was like four hundred kilometers per orb over the entire run and 250 kilometers of vertical distance covered which over a month is like the whole height of Everest or almost the whole height of Everest or something. And we crunched 2.7 petah bytes of tracking data which is lots you know.

7:55But we had to make changes along the way you know it's not like it's perfect from go like we had to get the timing right and you can't do that until you've really put it in front of real people.

8:06And we've done this before like with audience other projects like you always have to do the tuning on-site with real people because you can never guess what they're gonna do and we also have to like fill it with the verticality of it as well like so you have these white featureless circles in a big dark black room where you lose all of your depth perception and suddenly you have no way of knowing how far away anything is we had to really like play with that but react react with people to it like they made lines and this is like the best part of my job seeing what people do you know like they make lines they make circles we didn't tell them to do this they just do it like we had jumpers so many jumpers jumpers and flail --is flail is I've got hours of this stuff spinners spinners were nice you know like we had no idea what people are gonna do and it's amazing that getting to do this live with real people you know like it's really really nice with waivers tons of waivers so many waivers ♪

9:28interestingly the tracking system can't see arms this is points you know like runners had a couple of runners ready a three to one yeah go go go go you know like and people but people stopped you know what like this isn't this is like my from the really interesting thing to me like people stopped and lay down and spent hours just lying down and watching you know like their this is a super interesting thing like the peace and the space that it was in was very contemplative like almost meditative in some ways and it really highlights the durational aspect of the you know these creatures who live in roundhouse for a month something like a rain run is very immediate like you just you know instant gratification in some ways and this had a much more slow burn it was really really nice to see people taking the time to let that happen a lot of like stretching as well just like unconscious reaching up to a higher power which was really interesting to see we so had these guys I don't know what they're doing [Laughter]

11:07so anyway. That's enough for me I'm on the Internet random audience there if you want some more it's been lovely talking to you thank you very much [Applause]