Brighton and Hove City Council invited Anna Dumitriu to develop an artwork to mark “Walk To School Week” in collaboration with St Nicolas Junior School in Portslade. This year’s events had a national theme of “Sound Detectives” which in many ways focused on experience, the experience of walking to school, the senses being used, how the senses are focussed and what is noticed and what is left out. Through workshop sessions about robot sensor technology which included performance exercises the children learnt how robots are able to sense and interact with the world and change (or evolve) their behaviour appropriately. More deeply the project looked at how we experience the world and how particular areas of focus change our perception of experience. This relates strongly to ideas of mindfulness, and the notion that the sensation of consciousness may be the compound result of our senses acting together in the world. The project took many ideas from the evolutionary robotics discipline and in particular Francisco Varela’s work on The Embodied Mind. Children participated in performance exercises designed to her them experience the world (and their journey to school) in a new mindful way, sensing their environment and experiences through their interactions with it and building on those sensations to create a a more powerful sense of awareness.

As the Artist in Residence at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University Dumitriu was able to introduce the children to some exciting robots, kindly loaned by Bill Bigge. The children started to react to the robot as if it was alive so the issue of what ‘life’ might mean (a central question in robotics and artificial life technology) could be introduced and they discussed whether a minimal version of ‘life’ could mean something that was able to sense the world and react to it. A very simple thing that can produce very complex behaviours.

The children were asked to walk to school mindful of all the sounds around them and then report and discuss those sounds. Dumitriu then took those sounds to create a special Algorithm March (a simple dance which produces complex outcomes by working ‘canon style’) which the entire school performed before the media and local counsellors with everyone dressed as robots.

The project took contemporary research from the evolutionary robotics field and engaged 7 - 11 year olds with the theoretical and practical issues as well as questioning notions of experience, what life is (or could be), our assumptions about what robots are or look like and how simple rules (algorithms) can produce complex and emergent (especially when they got the moves wrong) outcomes.

See the video here.