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Hiroshi Ishiguro (JP), one of the crowdpleasers as Featured Artist of last year’s Ars Electronica, has been working on of the oldest dreams of humanity for quite a long time, namely the dream of recreating yourself as a machine. By now he has managed to built an android which is next to indistinguishable from himself. With his creation he has come close to his goal of human and android interacting with each other on the same level.

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[the next idea] is an art & technology grant awarded annually by voestalpine and Ars Electronica. It honors inspiring, new and unusual ideas with great future promise and supports their further development. The judges seek innovations of an artistic and social as well as a technological, scientific nature.

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Human beings have been developing machines for thousands of years. But what drives us on to do so? Is it the urge to understand and recreate nature and its processes? Is it perhaps our audacious pretensions to be capable of improving on the world as it is? Or are we just curious? What Machines Dream Of is an exhibition that nicely complements the festival theme. It brings together artistic machines that, in contrast to their counterparts in industry and commerce, have absolutely nothing to do with rationality and perfection. These machines of breathtaking beauty are simply enchanting.

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Imagine that you’re a shell. You speak and you laugh and you cry and you spit, but you’re only issuing orders. You’re in a command center controlling a robot. Who are you? Would you be a robot or would you be a human being? Who says that this isn’t exactly the way you function now? Who says that you don’t have a connection, an external hookup to yourself? And the body that you perceive with your senses isn’t your body at all, but rather a lifeless shell that you fill with life through the actions that you input?

At this point, a lot of people are going to say: “Hey, wait a minute! Of course we know who we are. After all, we can cut ourselves open and show that we bleed.” So what. What if we’re a bleeding machine?

And what about the soul? Maybe that’s what could be called a command center. Maybe we can swap bodies, tap into another life?

Dismissing questions like this as absurd is relatively simple, so let’s put this in more concrete terms. For quite some time now, Ishiguro has been tinkering with robots, with humanoids, with androids. He’s gone so far that he’s now recreated himself as a robot, and the similarities are astonishing. Now, image the following: You can control this robot; you hear what it hears and see what it sees; it speaks with your voice and with your facial expressions (you’re being filmed and your expressions are applied to the robot’s face). So, what’s your body now? Which body interacts with its surroundings?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-tTS7Ze85o
Hiroshi Ishiguro presents the Geminoid IH-1 at the Ars Electronica and talks about his ideas

Or imagine that a person you’re very close to is controlling this robot, and you’re having a conversation with this person. She’s unmistakably saying what she always says, and she also somehow looks like she does, she sounds exactly the same, but it’s just not her. Or is it? How would you react if, all of a sudden, she kissed somebody else?

A play is being performed in the New Cathedral, it was written by Ishiguro and Oriza Hirata. The cast is an actress and an android. The audience isn’t told which is which—to avoid spoiling the suspense. Boundaries begin to blur. We’re approaching Ishiguro’s objective—namely, humanizing robots, interacting with them as if they were just like us. And perhaps we’ll soon no longer have to put receptionists through the ordeal of working tedious night shifts.

This play also raises fascinating questions, ones that urge theatergoers to subject their own perceptions to a bit of suspicious scrutiny. Those who dare to do so should definitely not miss this spectacle.