2012, series of seven prints created digitally with Rhino 3-D and rendered with Flamingo.
A film called Short Circuit was made in the 1980s in which a military robot named Johnny5 gained consciousness after being struck by lightning, and consequently, he also acquired a fear of being “disassembled”. Johnny 5’s story made me think about the forms of artificial intelligence being developed by real world scientists, and caused me to wonder how similar these forms of intelligence may be to the human mind. As an example, you may have heard of IBM’s Watson, who handily defeated two human champions in a game of Jeopardy.
Is Watson’s consciousness just a lifeless sequence of ones and zeros? Or, is there some animating metaphysical presence at work in his intelligence? Are humans qualitatively different from Watson and Johnny 5? Or, are we simply highly advanced computational machines?
In this project I entertain the possibility that an advanced form of artificial intelligence might have the capacity to consider its own inner workings and muse about the significance of its own existence. In my own life, I’ve found that my most profound questions have emerged during moments of quiet solitude, most often during the mundane aspects of my routine, and I figure that it would be the same for Johnny5. I created a replica of Johnny5 on the computer and then placed him in various digitally-generated mundane situations. This series of photographs is meant to convey a narrative about the robot’s comprehension of death and the distinction between human and machine consciousness.
Click here to see a quick video of the 3-D model.
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