archipelago.ch depicts a tour of newly discovered “islands” which are actually a series of robotic research labs at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich.
achipelago.ch iterates the discovery, analysis and interpretation of their terrain and indigenous creatures. The “creatures” inhabiting each island are the idiosyncratic robots evolved by each researcher from their choice of morphologies occurring in nature, i.e., a insect eye, mouse whiskers discerning textures by touch, etc.
Robotic systems at the AILAB are evolved for research and experimentation on the interrelationship between morphology, cognitive capabilities, and environment in generating behavior. Each robot constitutes a creature for a section of the video and is named after the corresponding researcher: a “mouse” (St. Simir Island) - capable of perceiving its environment through rat whiskers as a sensory modality; quadrupeds (Fumiya Island). And aquatic creatures moving through water via stimulated oscillation (Marcus Cove).
The video voiceover consists of verbatim text from Darwin’s Voyage lf the Beagle, Chapter 17: The Galapagos, with some contributions from researchers’ papers. The lab terrains are strewn with the tools and detritus of each researcher’s endeavors and treated as flora. Depiction of isolated robotic parts, particularly those from trial and error experimentation, emphasizes a robot’s evolution as a specimen striving for fitness and survival. Coincidentally, the video is narrated by Andrew Berry, Alfred Wallace historian and an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology lecturer at Harvard University, who attended Shrewesberry School of which Charles Darwin was an alumni.
Director of AILAB: Dr. Rolf Pfeifer
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