The arm hanging from Ken Rinaldo's living-room ceiling looks like a 9-foot version of a heavy-duty crane's projecting arm, but it's constructed from dried grapevines, not steel. At the arm's shoulder, a nervous system of colored wires emerges from a tightly packed assortment of little circuit boards. The wires branch out to microphones, speakers, and infrared sensors mounted along the length of the arm. Rinaldo's partner, Mark Grossman, toggles a switch and the three-jointed arm twitches to life and begins to sway, very slightly.
I start to ask a question - the arm, hearing my voice, perks up and, driven by cables attached to a motor, cautiously bends toward me as though sniffing like a stray dog. When I back away, the arm follows, hovering close, but never quite touching me. Rinaldo explains that the arm's behavior program is structured like an onion. "The core layers of the program deal with the most important aspects of behavior, such as self- preservation. The idea is you add layers of more advanced behavior on top of the core behavior. If a lower level is safe it can go to the next level of behavior."
The arm is one of a group of three, collectively called "The Flock." Designed and built by Rinaldo, a former ballet dancer and computer systems consultant, and Grossman, a co-founder and principal engineer of Silicon Graphics Inc., "The Flock" was developed to explore the way technology's course of development repeats the evolutionary history of DNA-based life forms.
Besides approaching the source of a sound, the arm also exhibits repulsion behavior: By sending out a pulse-modulated beam of infrared light, it can measure the distance to an object and will avoid striking it. If the arm moves in the direction of a sound and doesn't sense anything in its way, it will "sing" out its position to the other arms using audible telephone tones, and they will "flock" to that location.
What are the consequences of modeling technology after biology? Rinaldo believes that the two are rapidly fusing together, "resulting in visualization of the earth as a total interdependent living system, an emergent form of human consciousness through digital transmissions, perception extension through microscopic-teleoptic technology, computer- mediated amplification and an overall collapse of space time." Ken Rinaldo: +1 (415) 566 5133.
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