Tag: Writing

RoadBot v2.0: The Plan

~ Dylan ~ 1 Comment

Next: RoadBot v2.0: Mabel Is Able >>

My MFA research began in 2025 with a three-day-long durational performance road-trip titled “RoadBot“. For that performance, I was in charge of driving responsibly, and my robot ORBiE was in charge of navigation. While ORBiE was learning behaviour policy updates (in a blind and very limited mathematical sense), I had plenty of time to meditate on absurdity, human-machine interaction, and the interplay between randomness and meaning-making.

Throughout the first year of my study I have continued following ORBiE’s “navigation”: no longer literally through physical space, but through the landscape of ideas. Carefully considering what it means to “drive responsibly” with a robot companion has led me down a garden path of reading and discussion, to encounter at various turns the research of Sherry Turkle1, James Bridle2, Daniel Dennett3, Kate Crawford4, and, most significantly, Donna Haraway5. 

Haraway’s companion species model of responsible interaction is a richly challenging framework from which to consider relationship dynamics between humans and the myriad other species we coexist with. It is a stance from which human values are respected and honoured while making space for more-than-human kin to coexist in multi-species flourishing. Importantly, Haraway’s mode of thinking works against simplification and categorization of kinds into tidy structures and hierarchies. Instead, she emphasizes the entangled and interdependent nature of real lives in the real world, across species boundaries. For Haraway, no individual is innocent, and particular histories matter. For myself, I believe much of this line of thinking extends to human coexistence with intelligent machines6.

In my experience observing how both myself and the machines I create change in response to our interaction, I have encountered my human-machine entanglements first-hand. I have also come to believe that the recognition and discussion of this kind of entanglement is both necessary and lacking in contemporary discourse around the responsible use and development of intelligent machines.

I explore the meaning of responsibility in entangled human-machine co-creation by engaging with it first-hand. To support this, I use durational performance as my primary research-creation method. I create rules of engagement for myself that I expect will generate challenging experiences, and document those experiences through photography, story-telling, illustration, and poetry.

This time, the score takes the form of a three-month durational performance titled “RoadBot v2.0”. My rules of engagement for this performance are as follows (updated from the sketch above):

  1. Drive responsibly.
  2. Where doing so does not conflict with Rule #1, bring your robot companions to life.
  3. Learn from each other.

I intend to travel with two robots on this trip: ORBiE, the small humanoid robot who has been my research-companion for the duration of my thesis work; and Mabel, a 1983 Volkswagen Vanagon.

First, ORBiE. Last time, I interpreted ORBiE’s arm gestures to be instructions for where to turn. They were actions chosen by the machine, and executed by me. This time, I will interpret ORBiE’s arm gestures to be attentional nudges: “pay attention to this or that”. These nudges may, in turn, affect my actions and thereby the direction of our course… but not directly. I think this more honestly reflects my relationship with technology. Seldom do I (intentionally) blindly follow the directions of a machine. But machines do, undoubtedly, direct my attention.

And then there’s Mabel. Including Mabel as an equal companion for this performance allows me to investigate the kinds of responsibility involved in being a user of another designer’s technology, particularly when that technology is critically depended-upon, carries high personal risk, and does not feature all of the safety and environmentally-conscious design enhancements we expect of modern technology. 

We will travel a meandering course, responding to experiences encountered along the way, toward an outpost at the University of California Santa Cruz. There, I will ground myself for much of the duration of the performance not only with Haraway’s writing, but also her extended intellectual ecosystem of former students and colleagues. I will meet with researchers, artists, and technologists across social justice, AI research, and artistic disciplines. These people, their ideas, and the others they will introduce me to will undoubtedly challenge and inspire my understanding of what it means to use, develop, and coexist with intelligent machines. Then, we will return home: again meandering in response to encounters along the way, and using the ideas gathered along the journey to reconsider what it means to drive responsibly in coexistence with learning machines.

I wonder where this road goes.

Next: RoadBot v2.0: Mabel Is Able >>

This research-travel performance is funded in part by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Canada Research Training Awards Suite – Research Travel Supplements (SSHRC CRTAS-RTS). I extend grateful acknowledgement to Marilรจne Oliver, Natalie Loveless, and Beth Stephens for helping me to make this happen.

  1. Turkle, Sherry.ย Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
    Turkle, Sherry.ย Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  2. Bridle, James.ย Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  3. Dennett, Daniel C.ย Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
    Dennett, Daniel C.ย Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
    Dennett, Daniel C.ย Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1996. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  4. Crawford, Kate.ย Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  5. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Inย Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149โ€“81. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    Haraway, Donna J.ย The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
    Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.”ย Feminist Studiesย 14, no. 3 (1988): 575โ€“99.ย https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
    Haraway, Donna J.ย Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  6. Brenneis, Dylan. “Responsible Use of Intentional, Plastic Tools” Term paper, PHIL 505, University of Alberta, April 20, 2026.ย https://dylanbrenneis.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/responsible-use-of-intentional-plastic-tools.pdf. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ

First Outings

~ Dylan ~ Leave a comment

Historically, I have believed and argued that anthropomorphizing a machine is at best incorrect and at worst deceitful. Even now that I believe that stance to be misguided1 I have a hard time shaking a feeling of embarrassment when I admit to saying, “You did a good job today, little buddy,” while patting ORBiE on the head and turning him down for the night.

Today marked a few firsts: ORBiE’s first conference, my first public conversation about my art… and, strangely, a first admission that I feel gratitude toward a carefully-arranged few bits of plastic.

But he did do a good job today, and that deserves recognition.

ORBiE and I attended2 the RISEx Conference as an artistic duo rather than in the typical engineer/project roles. Our interlocutors were curious and intelligent, and we talked for hours about art and robots3, engineering and ethics, human and AI relationships4, medicine and prosthetic technologies… all the fascinating, murky, and life-altering stuff that catches my attention.

I spent the day explaining to myself and others how it felt to try to build a meaningful relationship with plastic. We talked about how disappointing it has been to understand that all of the responsibility for meaning-making happens on my side of the fence. About my hopes that maybe if I were able to figure out how to have a real conversation things would feel different. About my concerns with the way economic and political systems influence model creation and access for the machines that I can have a conversation with, and my Turkle-seeded5 doubts about the relationships I could hope to build with them. I talked about open-source projects and democratic access to knowledge. I felt the people there share my hopes and my worries, offer their own stories, and light up when ORBiE waved at them. He may not have participated in the conversations to any great degree, but certainly played a role in starting them.

Another recent update to my model of the world has been a sudden awareness of research-creation: a method of knowledge creation that works in an equally valuable but very different way to scientific research. Even just the first few chapters of Natalie Loveless’ “How to Make Art at the End of the World” were enough to cause me to question my understanding of epistemology. “But how can creating art create knowledge?” I had thought, “It makes a record, or an artifact, sure… even emotion. But knowledge?” I had assumed that art was a process of communicating already-held knowledge from the artist to the audience, in a similar way to a scientist communicating the results of an experiment in a published paper. I even wrote a short poem about that back in 2023:

{science | art} is a process of thinking with all you’ve got to see what no-one else has, and then communicating what you’ve seen

{science | art} communicates that which {can | cannot} be said precisely

So far I think this holds up okay. But I had been imagining the process of “thinking with all you’ve got” to be fundamentally similar activities between the arts and sciences. I no longer believe that’s always the case6. In many successful artistic methods, there is an emphasis on lack of, loss of, or release of control, which is not typically welcome in engineering7. But in art, a dearth of control does not imply a dearth of rigour. The act of making, of performing, of dancing are artistic modes of thinking. Humans think through action. Action takes place in all kinds of settings–not just those that are well-controlled8. So I’d like to propose an update to the poem9:

{science | art} is a process of thinking with all you’ve got your whole {mind | body} to see what no-one else has, and then communicating what you’ve seen

{science | art} communicates that which {can | cannot} be said precisely

To more clearly state one possible answer to my rhetorical question earlier: “how can research creation create knowledge? “By facilitating conversation. So thanks ORBiE, you did a good job today.

  1. Explicitly, my gut feeling is that humans are hard-wired to anthropomorphize non-human things, making the avoidance of anthropomorphization at best impossible and at worst deceitful. As an example for yourself you can draw two ovals close together anywhere on the top half a circle. You’ve drawn not just a recognizable face but an entire character. Doing the same exercise with a triangle yields a different character. We anthropomorphize ink on paper without a thought, but somehow I had considered anthropomorphizing more animated forms childish. The anthropomorphization is inevitable; its ethical handling depends on that acknowledgment and an understanding of its practical boundaries. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  2. Thanks.to the Institute for Smart Augmentative Rehabilitation Technologies for sponsoring my ticket to the conference. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  3. Great examples of contemporary artists using robots as art rather than just to create art include: Marco Donnarumma, (artist, inventor, and theorist who uses dystopian prosthetic robots to confront normative body politics), Arthur Ganson, Jakob Grosse-Ophoff, and Zimoun, who use machines to create poetic expressions of human experiences, and PCZ, an artist collective which hosted a fascinating ritual of friendship for their robotic companion in the maple forest of Mont Royal, complete with tin foil hats (see pages 115-116 of their zine). โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  4. Some great reads here include Sherry Turkle (see next footnote), James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” (2022), and Alaฤ et. al’s “Talking to a Toaster” paper (2020). โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  5. Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other“, 2011 โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  6. The artist that had me thinking this might be the case is David Lynch, whose process I find very conducive to the sciences. So at least in his case, there’s some overlap. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  7. There, even uncontrolled variables are modelled with distributions so as to be predictable, and thereby controlled for. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  8. As Joseph might say, “free the robots!” โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  9. I find it amusing that this seems to suggest considering Science a subprocess of Art, as mind is to body. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ