SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 31

that are involved in doing good research in the sciences
are also needed to make good art.
JF: Is there something the arts bring to the sciences?
KG: Artists don’t like playing by the rules. As an artist, I
can challenge conventional wisdom.
JF: This is the 20th anniversary of Telegarden—a landmark
work for Internet, interactive art. How did this piece come
about?
KG: I was doing scientific research based on manufacturing—grasping, geometry, and control for robotics—and we had a few robots in the lab for experiments.
I was using robots to paint—essentially exploring their
weaknesses. I was told by a colleague that art was not
going to be taken seriously and that it was not a good
use of my time. So I went underground and stopped
talking about it. When the World Wide Web came out
in about ’93, I realized it could be used to make an art
installation for a very large audience. I was really interested in the idea that you could put something online
and people could experience it from anywhere in the
world.
At the time, you could look at images and text online,
but you couldn’t interact with the physical world. There
were some webcams and things like that, but they were
all passive. Then we—my colleagues and I—started
thinking: “We have a lab, and we have these robots…
could we combine these with the web?” That’s when we
came up with the garden.
We built the planter with soil and irrigation, and then
we built the robot and user interface for the web. I
believe this was the first web–based system where you
could actually do something versus just looking. People
would have to actively tend their plants. They could act
on this world and see the results.
JF: Why do you think there was so much enthusiasm? Why do
you think 100,000 people logged on? Was it novelty or something
else?
KG: It was somewhat the novelty, but more significantly
I think it was the contrast between a very natural kind
of environment and a digital one. We humans have
very fundamental relationships with plants. A garden is
interesting because it is something that is controlled as
opposed to the wilderness.
There was also a social aspect of Telegarden that was
unique at the time. The majority of people would go
and just sort of look around, but there was also a smaller
number that would actually spend significant time on
the site. My sense from reading the logs—there was an
early form of a chat room there—was that there was
a kind of very sociable, supportive interaction taking
place. It became a community garden.
JF: Telegarden was based in telerobotics. What is telerobotics?

SciArt in America February 2016

KG: It’s the ability to control a machine, a device, or
a robot over a distance. In one sense, something like a
radio–controlled car is an example of a telerobot. It’s important to make the distinction between a robot—which
in its purest form is operating autonomously, there is no
human in the loop—versus a telerobot where a human is
essentially driving. Telerobotics has been used for a long
time in areas and situations where there is danger, like
handling nuclear materials or defusing bombs, undersea exploration, and in space. With Telegarden, I believe
we were the first to develop a telerobot that the public
could operate.
JF: Is there something collaborative occurring between the
person and the telerobot?
KG: I don’t think of the robot as a collaborator, not
creatively. Sometimes you see an article that states that
a robot has written a piece of music or a poem. When
you dig into that, it generally means that someone has
programmed a bunch of rules and patterns—some fugue
style, for instance, and the robot’s generated a composition that sounds like a fugue.
I think of the robot as the subject. Machines are the
focus of my art, but I don’t think of them as having any
volition or any consciousness. As an engineer and artist,
I feel a responsibility to be a critic of the exaggeration
and hype around technology.
JF: Your early works dealt with telerobotics, but you’ve also
made works that address telepresence—the idea that something
is happening live in one place, but is being related somewhere
else. Was there something that led you in that direction?
KG: There was an issue that came out of Telegarden in
which a student asked whether the garden was real. This
caught me completely off guard. To some degree this i 0