BigBots: Keny Marshall

prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices

The Game of Life will be “chirped” out at the Mattress Factory Museum this summer, by a BigBot created by artist Keny Marshall for Robot 250.

The installation is entitled prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices, but can also be called Crickets. “Crickets is a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via thin wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden and over nearby structures,” said Marshall. “Communicating to their neighbors via signals in the wires, the robotic creatures activate and deactivate each other using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life,” Marshall said. “When active, the creatures thump their noisemakers. When inactive, they are silent.” The overall structure of the interaction resembles the way dogs talk to each other yard-to-yard…but much faster, in what Conway called, “emergent complexity.” Conway’s rules are very basic. As applied by him, cells or things in proximity to one another could live, die and come back to life, dependent on the number of neighbors it has. Each unit will have a single wooden knocker that it thumps in a given pattern depending on whether it is alive or dead. The result will be an ever changing harmony of cricket sounds, and robotic interactions throughout the garden.

Keny Marshall

I build metal sculpture and interactive Kinetic art that plays with our notions of technology and how people relate to the world around them. Hand-built devices are combined in seemingly ridiculous ways as a means of critiquing the increasingly invisible world that technology inhabits. Electric motors, surplus lab equipment, and scrap hardware are used to build systems with transparent inner workings, devices that counteract the “blackbox” nature of technology, which as it becomes modernized, gets increasingly smaller, encased, and harder to understand. In removing the protective shells of these mechanisms, I bare not just the physical constructions within, but the ideological ones as well. My artwork provides a level of immediacy between people and the world around them.

http://www.brew-house.org/gallery/?id=8