Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White (US)
http://www.flong.com/projects/snout/

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Documentation

The interactive installation “Double-Taker (Snout)” deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood and autonomous surveillance. The project consists of an eight-foot-long (2.5m) industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity. Sited on a low roof above an entrance and governed by a real-time machine-vision algorithm, “Double-Taker (Snout)” orients a supersized googly-eye towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. The goal of this kinetic system is to perform convincing “double-takes” at its visitors, in which the sculpture appears to be continually surprised by the presence of its own viewers—communicating, without words, that there is something uniquely surprising about each of us.

“Double-Taker (Snout)” was commissioned by Robot250, an initiative of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. The project was enabled through critical support from the CMU Collaborative Machining Center, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PCA), George Moving & Storage Inc. and the ABB Mechatronics and Robotic Automation Research Group. Additional support for this project came from the Creative Capital Foundation, from the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at Carnegie Mellon University and from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.