Robotics Speaking for the Speechless exhibited at Speak Your Body Out Workshop_IKSK

Robotics Speaking for the Speechless

June 8th, Saturday 20:00-20:30
IKSK_ Institut für Köperforschung und Sexuelle Kultur
Holzmarkt 25 Haus 2, 4. Etage, 10243 Berlin, Germany

Chang will give a presentation of the work and related research on June 8th, 20:00-20:30 at IKSK.

Dr. Chang Gao (@gao.chang_rca) is a Berlin and Londn based Artist, a visiting Lecturer teaching at University of Art London. Chang holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art @royalcollegeofart in London. She is a Public Art Researcher at Public Art Research Centre of China as well as a Director and Establisher of Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Art @cafaofficial . She is a visual artist using multiple media in her practice production, such as sculpture, robotics, AR interface, film, photography, hologram installation etc. This research uses eroticism and supernormal stimuli in art making, derived from evolutionary psychology, which evokes the audience’svdesire regardless of racial, cultural, gender or individual differences. It contends that the energy induced from this desire represents people’s particular status and position, which serves as a subversive tool to reveal the issues within postcolonialism and consumerism.

“Speaking for the Speechless”
At the SPEAK YOUR BODY OUT festival, she will present a robotic installation “Speaking for the Speechless”, available for interacting with during the three days. This robotic project aims to speak for the people who are unable to speak up their repressed political opinions, especially within the political environment where censorship represses most people from speaking freely. It invites the audience to type down their political opinion through the keyboard of the computer, then the robotic mouth speaks out the sentence people are afraid to speak up in the public space. In this sense the robotic mouth encourages the audience to speak freely about their political opinions and behaves as an agency to speak for people, who are incapable of speaking for their own voice.

The robotic installation Speaking for the Speechless encourages the public to speak up their voice via the robotic mouth out of shame, out of fear, out of censorship and out of social-political as well as personal level of repression. Festival Speak Your Body Out aims to create a trauma informed space, where vulnerabilities, shared experience, expertise and knowledge are welcome and celebrated. The festival accompanies with a series of art and body workshops, sound bath, and embodied dancing and interactive body work to better understand our nervous system, learning how to regulate and communicate with these systems, developing languages around boundaries, consent and intimacy.

During the cuddle puddle session, I entered a transcendental spiritual level of calm and serenity, in which makes me thinking if the sense of sex without body, or intimacy without skin touch ever possible. When the physical mouth creates sound and visualizes the movement of speaking, what feelings it channels and what happens when embodied bodily affect reach at the conscious level of verbal representations? Is the linguistic representation the final stage of releasing from all our bodily affect and emotions? Will the robotic mouth have its own agency of experiencing sex, desire and love? What desire, love and sex it will generate without a body? And how AI and technology mediate desire and intimacy this his post-AI and technology informed era? Probably these questions remain as open as they are right now, and it awaits further speculation and interrogation for my upcoming project on AI and SEX.