Emanuel Gollob’s Doing Nothing with AI was selected to be part of FUTURES, the inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Building, which reopened last fall after more than twenty years undergoing repairs. The exhibition invites visitors to look optimistically toward the future, providing a space for imagination and rehearsal where inclusiveness and sustainability are at the forefront of innovation. It tests the potential benefits of technology outside the monopoly of a few individuals and corporations, and as a form of worldbuilding integrated within multiple fields and sources of knowledge. Through its biomorphic form and fluid movements, Gollob’s robotic sculpture prompts a critical examination of the relationship between humans and machines in contemporary society, seeking to disrupt anthropocentric ideologies and envisioning generative systems of co-creation.
A doctoral student at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Gollob is interested in the critical dialogue between technological innovation and aesthetics. His robotic sculpture captures the attention of the visitor with its simultaneously strange and familiar appearance. The KUKA KR6 R900-2 robotic arm — traditionally used for industrial assembling — generates a choreographic sequence while prompting the viewers to “do nothing”. As they aim to reach a state of inactivity, a motion sensor reads their physical movements. The mechanical skeleton is covered with a thick fabric cloak that resembles the skin of a porcupine or a cactus, conveying a sense of the organic without any trace of human physiognomy. The sculpture rotates and contracts, causing its outer surface to expand and recede, at once revealing and concealing its spines through an optical effect achieved with the use of complementary colors. Simultaneously attracting and repelling, the interaction with this curious mechanical object becomes quite paradoxical.
The choreographic sequence produced by a generative machine learning model, reproduces the symbiotic relation between human and machine, or what is known as human-computer interaction (HCI). In this case, what sets off the interaction is a cognitive state and physical behavior that emerges from brain inactivity. The gestures made by the spectator are incorporated into the choreographic sequence, unfolding slowly through the sculpture’s hypnotizing dance. The aim is not imitation or simulation, but a generative interaction where both parts retain their autonomy. In privileging inactivity to create a multi-referential sequence of gestures, DNWAI disrupts traditional hierarchies between humans and machines fueled by utopian and dystopian narratives where humans become machines or completely succumb to their power.
Central to Gollob’s work is the concept of “doing nothing”. Borrowed from the famous dictum in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” from 1853, the phrase foregrounds recent critical approaches to the increasing technologization of life in its aim to improve efficiency, such as Byung-Chul Han’s notion of “the burnout society.” What interests the artist is not how the demands of productivity affect the division of time between leisure and labor, but the kind of “production time” that emerges when technology appeals and responds to “doing nothing”. The instructions provided to the viewer before interacting with the piece function as a form of warning: “In times of constant busyness, technological overload, and the demand for permanent receptivity to information, doing nothing is not much accepted, often seen as provocative and associated with wasting time.” Yet, instead of offering an alternative unproductive experience, Gollob’s robotic sculpture “intends to address the common misconception of confusing busyness with productivity or even effectiveness.” By underscoring the paradox of technology, which substitutes all reflective activities for merely operational ones, DNWAI invites a moment of pause when one expects to be entertained and engaged in activity.
The paradox surrounding our reliance on technology to facilitate life lies precisely in the fact that, in so doing, it defines and codifies our individual experiences. To Gollob, what seems detrimental to life is not the machine’s technical functions, in fact the robotic arm participates in the production of its cloak, but the ways in which each activity, especially leisure, is incorporated into production time. As he bridges the fields of art and technology the artist opens a question about the autonomous and the structural shaping of our behavior, juxtaposing acts of contemplation, creation, and production taking place through the interaction between human and machine. Drawing from a wide range of critical theories and research practices that link aesthetic practices and HCI (human-computer interaction) communities, the principles of performance-driven research “in the wild”, meaning with the involvement of participants and open-ended outcomes, allow the artist to test the potential and limits of AI in actual social and public environments. The interactions generated through this type of transdisciplinary HCI projects then become essential sources of knowledge for establishing a link between theory, research, and practice.
In earlier projects such as Robot, Doing Nothing, and Doing Nothing Ritual Gollob considers what would happen if human and machine interactions were not conditioned by the input and feedback of a specific activity but by undefined cognitive states and embodied responses. Beyond the humor and parody of these first object experiments that imagine a future where boredom is institutionalized and remunerated, in Doing nothing with AI the artist is up to a more serious task. Working with the modality of a robotic sculpture allows Gollob to speculate about and test the generative potential of durational and open-ended interactions that could shape production time. In this exchange, human and machine do not respond to encoded tasks defined as intelligence but operate and are activated through multi-referential chains of cognitive and emotional states. According to the artist, DNWAI consolidates earlier experiments as it produces an adaptive and interactive aesthetic strategy that is “not just an optimized static aesthetic, but rather demands an aesthetic in the flux.” Informed by transdisciplinary and boundary-bending fields of research linking industrial design, the social sciences, neuroscience, and computer science, Gollob’s work engages a wide range of contemporary studies such as generative machine learning, Kristina Höök’s “affective loop” theory, Hayles, N. Katherine’s notion of hyper and deep attention, Helmut Leder´s model of aesthetic experience, among many others.
Another vital element within Gollob’s own articulation of an “aesthetic in the flux” is dance, which allows him to explore the interactive dynamic of movement from an embodied and social-emotional perspective. In a conversation with the artist, he prefers not to align himself with any artistic tradition. However, he sees commonalities with iconic works from the Austrian modernist avant-garde, such as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet. When asked whether he would consider his work to be in dialogue with the Austrian and German expressionist dance tradition, specifically with Rudolf von Laban’s theories of movement, Gollob kindly replies that although not a direct influence, he is interested in exploring the potential and limitations that Labanotation shares with conventional robotic motion notation. What becomes evident with DNWAI is that dance can play a major role in the formulation of an aesthetic in the flux that could positively impact the development of generative models of human-computer interaction while foregrounding embodied and affective responses.
Emanuel Gollob grew up on his grandmother’s small self-sustaining farm in a village named Grossklein, located in the southern countryside of Austria, a region known for its pleasing wavy landscape and steep vineyards. Remembering these early formative years, the artist reflects on how the exposure to farm life, with its slow-paced seasonal rhythms, cross-species coexistence, and repetitive manual tasks, fueled his concern with the idea of productivity and its entanglement with our experience of space and time. At a very young age, Gollob learned the art of woodworking from his father, carrying on a family tradition that can be traced back to several generations. Precision, patience, and an appreciation for the sensory qualities of materials are only a few of the skills inherited from his father that we still find in his work today.
After graduating from a technical high school for interior design and wood technology, Gollob went on to study industrial design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. One of his first projects, Craft LAB, belongs to this period of experimentation, where technology facilitates manual and creative activities that have their origin in craft practices and traditions. Soon after, he began to move away from designing consumer goods, as his focus shifted towards conceptual design projects. In 2014, he joined the experimental study group of speculative design led by British artist and professor Fiona Raby. But he would soon become concerned with the impact ideas and projects generated within the lab would have in real life. It was then that he decided to take on conceptual projects outside of the workshops and test their relevance with a broader audience.
From this moment on, Gollob’s field of research and interests expanded. He began to interweave discourses from different fields, attending lectures at other universities and even taking a practical seminar for improvisational dance at the University for Music and Performance Arts Vienna. In 2020, Gollob joined the Creative Robotics research group at the University of Art and Design in Linz as a researcher in an arts-based interdisciplinary research project at the intersection of fashion, biology, and robotics. The program “Fashion & Robotics” explores the artistic potential of bringing fashion design from 2D into 3D using digital tools and experimenting with biochemical materials. Doing Nothing with AI, Gollob’s art installation currently on view at the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Building in Washington, D.C., incorporates this new line of research as it employs biomorphic forms to challenge notions of productivity and efficiency in task-based technological functions. Working at the intersection of art and technology allows the artist to perform a critical intervention in multiple fields while bringing them into a productive dialogue. This is where DNWAI is most successful, in putting innovative AI technology to the test by inserting it within the uncharted territories of aesthetic perception, embodied interactions and indeterminate cognitive states where the art object is constantly being reconfigured.
About the writer
Patricia Ortega-Miranda is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History & Archeology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
