The Superposition

robotics and the complexity of replicating
in robots the degrees of freedom of
movement in the human hand.
The other two speakers were quite
excited about the provocation, and,
as good as the evening turned out
to be (at least from the feedback
we got afterwards), what didn’t end up
happening on the night was probably
at least as fascinating as what did.
Other possibilities we had discussed
before the evening included building
a demonstration robot to show the
similarities and differences between
movement making for humans and
robots, and demonstrating how Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation could be
used to turn a human into a puppet by
firing electromagnetic pulses at their
motor cortex.
electric toothbrush. The question he
posed here was whether humans are, at
least consciously, as in control of their
movements as they think.
This organisational process opened up
new possibilities for The Superposition,
by creating new collaborations between
Artists, Scientists and Makers who
would not otherwise work together,
and allowing us to see the possibilities
of our work from different perspectives.
This also creates the potential for a
Superposition evening to be the start
of a collaborative process between the
Artist, Scientist and Maker, rather than
an end point of each talking about work
that has already been made.
Our approach resulted in three interconnected
talks. Raymond defined
robots as artificial objects which
perform physical actions based
on what they sense (not necessarily
using Artificial Intelligence) to adapt
their choices based on success
and failure, as most robots simply
follow an algorithm set by a human
programmer, which he described
as a form of time-delayed puppetry.
I then introduced puppets as
conveyors of movement and expression
to an audience, which could
function as a prosthetic by extending
the puppeteer’s abilities, and that
‘robots’ which function only by remote
control, such as those in Robot Wars,
can more accurately be described as
puppets. Samit then compared how the
brain controls the human body through
feedback loops with the control of
robotic movement, and demonstrated
how we can interrupt our perception
of muscle position by using only an
84