Net_Dérive has been created by Atau Tanaka in collaboration with artist Petra Gemeinboeck. It sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring the area around the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience. A new kind of space is thus created at the interstices of existing spaces, a space that is fluid and transversal.

Team: Atau Tanaka

Collaboration: Petra Gemeinboeck, Ali Momeni, Gary Tunak, Clicmobile

The Robot’s Playroom was designed to offer new learning opportunities and exploration spaces for the Sony AIBO, and to test curiosity-driven learning algorithms. Thanks to this experiment the robot can now draw, ride a bike, control switches, pick up everyday objects, watch itself in a mirror, and more …
Team: Frédéric Kaplan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,

Collaborations: Martino d’Esposito, and ECAL Design Students

How do you choose from a collection of thousands of images? CSL researcher Peter Hanappe has developed the “Linking Linke” project which dives into the vast archive of pictures by Armin Linke and explores how coherent collections can be made using the technologies of social tagging and emergent semantics on the one hand, and the dynamical processes between users on the other.

Team: Melanie Aurnhammer, Peter Hanappe

 Collaborations: Armin Linke, Michelle Brunello, Stefano Graziani, and Students of the Faculty of Arts and Design, Università IUAV di Venezia, ClaVES undergraduate degree in Visual Arts and Theatre

Jean-François Peyret, well-known for his theatre plays inspired by scientific figures such as Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, builds his pieces mainly through improvisations, where actors take scientific and philosophical texts as source material and thus approach a subject that is normally the provence of science. The result is a fresh and creative look at the issues and theatre rich in meaning and esthetic experience. For “Le Cas de Sophie K.”, Peyret invited Luc Steels to work with him on the script for a play inspired by the 19th century Russian mathematician Sophie Kovalevskaya. The play was performed at the Avignon theatre festival in 2005 and at the French National Theatre of Chaillot in 2006.

Team: Luc Steels

Collaboration: Jean-François Peyret.

Olafur Eliasson is an artist who emphasizes process instead of final form in a lot of his work. This makes his art a perfect fit with the research of Luc Steels, whose work on the origins of language has always focused on the dynamic processes from which linguistic forms originate and change. Eliasson and Steels therefore collaborated on the “Look into the Box” installation. It was first shown at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2002 and came out of discussions held at the Bridge the Gap symposium in 2001 in Kitakyushu (Japan) between Steels and Eliasson.

Team: Luc Steels, Nicolas Neubauer