Performed again recently at Shunt Lounge under London Bridge Station, London on 6th and 7th March 2009.

Anna Dumitriu invites participants to create an installations in traditional and non-traditional spaces with her, taking ideas from the evolutionary robotics discipline and in particular Francisco Varela’s work and ideas about embodiment and situatedness. Collaborating participants experienced the space in a new mindful way, sensing their environment and experiences through their interactions with it and building on those sensations to create an emergent impression of the “useful fiction” of consciousness (Whitby 2003).

The title of the piece was created during the first performance which took place in Wales, as visitors suggested that the environment that Anna had created (from the found objects that were already around the space) had a safe and nest-like feeling, where they had ‘permission to create’. Someone suggested it was like being hugged, which led to a suggestion of the Welsh word for hug which is cwtsh, another then shorted version of this word cwt which means hut, the space was certainly like a small animal shelter or hut, thus the title emerged through our interactions with the space, and the sharing of experiences and ideas. No single person could have come up with that title it was a group effort that seemed to come from no-where but was utterly perfect. The interactions were filmed using night vision in the darkened space and participants reported that they felt the situation had a ‘dreamlike’ quality.

The participants interactions were directed by suggestions from Anna’s colleagues at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University where she is artist in residence. These suggestions can be found below:

“Descartes was wrong; ‘cogito ergo sum’ has a lot to answer for!”

“There are many more 'senses' than the five usual ones, temperature for instance. Be sensitive to the surfaces in the space, which are warmer? Which are cooler?”

“Spatiality affects the range of the senses, in that they give you information about your environment in roughly this order of spatial magnitude - taste (very local) touch sight hearing smell (arguably the most general). Is this something you are aware of now?”

“Try the enactive approach which states that action constitutes perception: the more unusual your action perhaps the more unusual your consciousness will become!”

“The side effect of being embodied in our forms is that we need to take care of them. We have our sense of touch to do this, which is something I would consider as a fairly critical factor in our physical and mental well being. This has also become apparent by people who experience the sensation of phantom limbs following amputation.”

“I see our sense of touch as the one sense that makes it absolutely clear that we are embodied by providing mental reinforcement of the boundary of where our physical form ends and the world begins.”

“The nature of embodiment for me highlights the boundary of our body as significant. Thinking about this for a few seconds has conjured an image of a human form in what looks like a wind tunnel, with smoke moving around it. I also see shadows and similar experiments with water...”

“Intelligent behaviour emerges out of the interplay between brain, body and world. The world is not just the 'play-ground' on which the brain is acting. Rather, brain, body and world are equally important factors in the explanation of how particular intelligent behaviours come about in practice.”

“Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain, called the neural correlates of consciousness, or NCCs. Proponents of Artificial Consciousness believe computers can emulate this interoperation, which is not yet fully understood. It is impossible to test if anything is conscious. To ask a thermometer to appreciate music is like asking a human to think in five dimensions. It is unnecessary for humans to think in five dimensions, as much as it is irrelevant for thermometers to understand music. According to the nihilistic view, consciousness is just a word attributed to things that appear to make their own choices and perhaps things that are too complex for our mind to comprehend. Things seem to be conscious, but that is just because our ethical attitudes require a conscious-not conscious distinction, or because of our empathy with other entities. Consciousness is an optional perspective or social construct.”

“The Turing test (or Imitation Game) is a proposal for identifying machine intelligence as determined by a machine's ability to interact with a person. In the Turing test one has to guess whether the entity one is interacting with is a machine or a human, without any visual clues — the conversation is usually held over a terminal. An artificially conscious entity could only pass an equivalent test when it had itself passed beyond the imaginations of observers and entered into a meaningful relationship with them, and perhaps with fellow instances of itself.”

“If it were certain that a particular machine was ‘conscious’ its rights would be an ethical issue that would need to be assessed (e.g. what rights it would have under law). For example a conscious computer that was owned and used as a tool or central computer of a building or large machine is a particular ambiguity. Should laws be made for such a case, consciousness would also require a legal definition.”

So try it for yourself, move through your world (or just your room) in a new mindful way, interact, make new connections, lie on the floor, crawl under the chairs, change things and see what will emerge.

The work was developed in collaboration with Dr Blay Whitby and is now being extended to also work with Dr Luc Berthouze, involving his work on epigenetic robotics.