Simple Machines: An interview with Joris Strijbos

Joris Strijbos at Sonic Acts Academy opening, photo by Pieter Kers
By Tina Amirtha The robots never surprise Dutch artist Joris Strijbos. For the most part, they follow all of the rules that he designs into their code. But he says he always wonders: Could they do more? Strijbos’s artworks incorporate elements of computer algorithms, electronics, and mechanically moving parts. For the last five years, he has been nurturing a recurrent theme in his projects: simple machines that communicate with each other by emitting and sensing light. By grouping these unsophisticated robots together, Strijbos hopes that they’ll collectively make an intelligent decision that they weren’t explicitly programmed to do. “If there was a way to get the robots to reprogram themselves – that’s an idea that I’d like to move towards,” Strijbos tells me. To do that, he and his collaborators would need to write more complicated lines of code – the kind of deep learning rules that recently powered a computer to beat a human at the game Go. For now, though, Strijbos takes pleasure in seeing the robots surprise him in other ways. “I like the idea of communities working together,” he says. And when you get robots together, “you can see it as a sort of audiovisual performance,” he adds. As part of Friday’s opening festivities at Sonic Acts Academy 2016, Strijbos showed his kinetic sculpture, IsoScope, in the Netherlands for the first time. It’s another of his experiments in communication dynamics. He wants to understand how seemingly simple objects can develop ostensibly more complex interactions with one another, even if they don’t become independently thinking units. Trained in fine arts, the 34-year old Strijbos looks less like a fragile auteur than someone who is used to lifting heavy objects, his frame matched by thick, black-rimmed glasses. After earning a master’s of art from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and bachelor’s degree from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Strijbos started writing and performing electronic music. Eventually, he began to create visual effects to accompany his shows. Now, he is represented by art gallery NOME in Berlin, and his work has been shown in the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, La Panacée contemporary cultural center in Montpelier, France, and the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris. Strijbos welcomes the type of projects that classical artists would normally avoid: constructing multiple larger-than-man robots that require hours of manual labor and resources. Together with other members of the art collective Macular, he designs and builds machines from mostly self-taught skills and open-source tools, like Arduino hardware. Whereas trained engineers would rather simulate virtual robots on a computer to save time and money, Strijbos believes the effort of constructing the physical versions from scratch is worth it. When his electro-mechanical setups do anything to make people stop and get them to discuss it, then he feels like he has done his job: “I really like the fact that you have this artificial installation, and then at some point, somebody will walk past and say, ‘There’s a cool thing going on here,’” he says. And while professional computer scientists continue developing more novel ways for robots to demonstrate intelligent behavior, Strijbos wants to figure out new ways to exploit the technology that is already out there: “We use a sensor to measure the voltage in the electricity that’s generated. And we use that in the sound synthesis, as well as the light sensor, which is arranged in a feedback loop,” says Strijbos of IsoScope. IsoScope, installed in Amsterdam this weekend, is Strijbos’s newest work. It builds on technology he developed for his kinetic sculptures around 2010. In 2012, he programmed Homeostase’s rotating arms to create a generative light performance based on the interaction dynamics of living cells. For his first solo exhibition, Phase=Order, six years ago, he built a network of 96 semi-reflective acrylic panels to resemble a naturally self-organizing system. Each of IsoScope’s 12 wind turbines moves in a controlled spin when the wind pushes against them. Depending on the wind’s speed, built-in computer code selects the frequency at which the turbine’s motors will run; at any given time, passersby would hear a mishmash of three. A sensor on each turbine’s frame detects light from the mounted lamps that rotate with the other spinning turbines. When a sensor detects light, its turbine’s lamp shuts off. A lamp turns on when its sensor detects no incoming light. The result is a humming family of spinning turbines mounted on spider-thin legs, their lights flashing on and off like they are transmitting an obscure communication code. On Friday, however, anyone who stopped to observe IsoScope saw little more than a group of strange inanimate structures in front of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Unluckily, the evening was uncharacteristically calm. A typical February near the North Sea is almost always violently breezy. A competing light show in a nearby park on the Museumplein only emphasised IsoScope’s lifelessness. But IsoScope was never supposed to be a traveling installation. Sonic Acts and the Norway-based arts curator Hilde Methi had commissioned it specifically to permanently reside on a hill in the Barents region, near the border that joins Norway and Russia above the Arctic Circle. There, Strijbos says, an inanimate kinetic sculpture would make more sense in its environment. During Sonic Acts’ first Dark Ecology trip in 2014, Strijbos was struck by the images of the abandoned playgrounds that he saw. As communities started to move out of economically depressed mining towns in Arctic Russia, they abandoned many public spaces like these, and they still stand today. “I had this idea that I would have this work somewhere in the mountains, and then in 10 years somebody would come back and say, ‘What is this?’ Nobody would know. Maybe it would become a strange landmark,” says Strijbos. With the Museumplein as a backdrop for IsoScope’s Dutch premiere, the element of surprise wasn’t lost. Whereas all of the museums surrounding the sculpture were vying for their patrons’ attention in sheer glass architecture and fluorescent light, IsoScope became an eccentric non-event. Strijbos’s code took a break for the night.

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