View - ResearchGate

Perceptions of Self 237semination of an art experience. The current pursuit of re-embodiment as acreative act answers to the cultural dominance of simulation in image-making,and also makes a direct appeal to emotion – think of the associative power ofsmell. While emotion has always had a place at the core of aesthetic theory,its manifestation adapts to changing cultural conditions. Greater embodimentin the art experience still implies for the viewer an expansion of the sense ofself, through these various solicitations of an integrated somatic, perceptual andintellectual response.In IA research, embodiment is a quite extensive concept that underlies manyof the more "lifelike" features of intelligent agents. The autonomous robotic orcomputer-based agents of IA research are built to be aware of and interact withtheir environment, as well as interacting with each other and with humans. Thetypes of possible interactions are broadly defined enough to encompass simplebehaviours, usually hard-wired to be adaptive to the immediate environment,as well as complex routines such as learning, some level of intentionality, andother features of emergent, evolved behaviour.Even if "self" in everyday speech signifies the human ability to attach bothintellectual and emotional meaning to a lifetime of accumulated memory, thelanguage that describes characteristics of emergent order such as self-organizingor self-regulating, when applied not to physical processes but to these embodiedartificial entities, implies at least in principle a generating of "selfhood." Thisfollows especially from the Alife logic that programmed functions of agentsparallel life processes, so that emergent and fully autonomous behaviour wouldequal alive – which would then entail a sense of self [1]. Equally, there aredescriptions from the cultural domain of such a non-anthropocentric idea ofself. French theoretician Georges Bataille says, "Even an inert particle, lowerdown the scale than the animalcula, seems to have this existence for-itself,though I prefer the words inside or inner experience" [3, p. 99]. He does go onto say, though, that this elementary feeling of self is not consciousness of self,that is distinctly human. Thus the two meanings of embodiment, and thereforethe kind of experience that a person might have in relation to either an artworkor an IA, at first seem to meet in their privileging of some kind of selfhood. Thefeatures of an IA that are an effect of its artificial, non-human self-recognitionmay very well mirror and enhance the sense of self in a person interacting withit. This would be most ensured by well-developed characteristics of social andemotional intelligence built into the agent, so that interactions with it seemnatural.But while concepts of embodiment are representational issues dependent onthe intrinsic qualities of artifacts and how those are conveyed, the investigationof selfhood vis-ˆ-vis these artifacts of research or art practice is necessarily interactive.It is bound up in our relations with them. Given the strong humanisttradition of art and the implicit technological nature of IAs, our relational expe-