Jessica Field is the youngest artist in the exhibition. Just two years before receiving support from the Foundation in 2002, she completed her training at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), where she was influenced by a number of her professors, particularly Norman White, an electronic arts pioneer in Canada. White’s impact on Field is notable, for, like him, she creates machines able to exhibit human behaviours and characteristics. This comical use of robotics is also common among other artists, such as Doug Back, who teaches at OCAD, and Laura Kikauka, a former student at the Toronto college. Like her colleagues, Field applies a principle of humour already recognised by Bergson in his comment, “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” (1) We can also reverse one of the philosopher’s statements: we laugh every time a thing gives us an impression of being a person. (2) Field uses robotics and mechanics to create machines capable of producing human behaviours in their attempts to interact with their environment. It is through sounds though that we perceive the comic effects; the sounds of buzzers or horns express the robots’ puzzlement when humans intrude in their small community.

For Alan, Brad, Clara and Daphne, the four robots, form a community where visitors are foreigners. Yet, Semiotic Investigation into Cybernetic Behaviour is dependent on the participation of visitors, because it is they who initiate the interactions between Alan and Clara when they arrive in the exhibition space. Alan and Clara detect the visitor’s presence. Brad translates for Alan by emitting a low pitched sound, and Daphne, for example, displays the following words: “I detect movement at ten feet” on Clara’s screen. If the visitor stops moving, Alan’s motion detector light turns off, and Brad reacts within a split second by making a noise. Daphne reacts by displaying the words “It is still not moving, what do you think it was?” It is through an awareness of the “discussion” that the visitor realises that he or she is the subject of the conversation between Alan and Clara as they try to “understand” this stranger.

J.G. © FDL 2007