“strange/r/evolution” solo show at SPRING/BREAK

strange/r/evolution
Works by Alexander Reben
Curated by Amy Kisch + Charlie James
at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
New York, NY
March 6 – 12, 2018

Conceived for the 7th edition of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York City’s curator-driven art fair, Amy Kisch and Charlie James present strange/r/evolution—a solo exhibition of works by Alexander Reben. We live in an age where technology is learning about people at an exponential rate. The idea of a true ‘stranger’ is becoming obsolete. Everything from our credit card numbers, voices, pulses, brainwaves, and biometrics of our faces (surveilled with or without our permission), tells our stories. Bay Area-based artist and roboticist, Alexander Reben, explores these and other aspects of our humanity, through the lens of art and technology. As an actual ‘stranger’ coming to town—the towns being the context of the art world and the city of New York—Reben’s artwork deals with human-machine relationships, synthetic psychology, artificial philosophy, and robot ethics. Using ‘art as experiment,’ he allows the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts.

Sometimes We Feel More Comfortable Talking To A Robot

“We spend a lot of time talking to Alexa and Siri. Imagine if such artificial personalities were put inside a cute, adorable robot. That’s what Alexander Reben has done. The artist created what he saw as the perfect interview machine to see how much he could get people to reveal to the robot.” – Laura Sydell

Modern copyright law can’t keep pace with thinking machines

“Questions like, “If a human can learn from a copyrighted book, can a machine learn from [it] as well?,” Reben recently posited to Engadget. Much of Reben’s art, supported by non-profit Stochastic Labs, seeks to raise such conundrums. “Doing something that’s provocative and doing something that’s public, I think, starts the conversation and gets them going in a place where the general public can start thinking about them,” he told Engadget.” – Andrew Tarantola

Design Museum Gent

“Factory operator, film character or military drone – we all know what a robot looks like. But have you ever actually encountered one? The interface between man and machine is getting smaller by the day. The smartphone, for example, has already changed our lives forever. The exhibition Hello, Robot. Design Between Human and Machine lays bare our relationship with technology.”

Wax Chromatic at the Charlie James Gallery

JULY 15 – AUGUST 19, 2017

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Wax Chromatic, our second solo exhibition with Bay Area artist Alexander Reben.

Alexander Reben‘s interactive work Wax Chromatic, will premiere in Los Angeles at Charlie James Gallery, opening Saturday, July 15. In this control-by-oration installation, viewers will be able to transform the gallery’s environment by imagining and verbalizing almost any color imaginable. Upon speaking the name of their preferred hue, the room — as will the symbiotic relationship between humanity and technology — will be illuminated with the articulated color. Color is of particular interest to Reben, given its concurrent massless nature and profound visual impact, as well as its infinitely variable gradations. The work continues the artist’s exploration into how through intelligent manipulations of our surroundings, we are becoming ever-more integrated into our environments—and they in turn, are increasingly becoming extensions of ourselves. Reben’s solo exhibition Wax Chromatic runs through August 19, 2017, alongside the group exhibition Black is a Color, curated by Essence Harden, with works by Sadie Barnette, Adee Roberson, Lauren Halsey, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Texas Isaiah, Azikiwe Mohammed, Nikki Pressley, and Patrick Martinez. An artist’s reception will be held Saturday, July 15 from 6-9pm.

Vienna Biennale: MAK Museum

“To some extent unheard and unseen, robotics—driven by Digital Modernity—has already fundamentally altered our working and daily lives. Yet people’s relationship to new technologies is often ambivalent. As the first comprehensive exhibition about the opportunities and challenges surrounding robotics, Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine broadens its scope to include the ethical and political questions arising from these enormous technological advances.”

The Hierophant at the Nicodim Gallery

“Dearly Beloved,

None of this has been easy. Nor was it meant to be. It has involved a great deal of transformation, of embodiment, of becoming. Part of me wonders if there is any going back and the rest of me knows that the only path is forward. I’ve shown you the Dark and I’ve shown you the Light. And now I will show you the Way.”

Watch Judah Friedlander Destroy This Derivative Art Robot in the Name of Humanity

““I don’t need email to do art, I just do it,” declares comedian Judah Friedlander in his latest installment of “Judah vs. the Machines,” a video series for Techcrunch wherein he goes head-to-head with robots to complete basic tasks humans have been doing just fine on their own for centuries. In this episode, Friedlander travels to Berkeley, California to take on Seuratbot, an art-making machine created by robotics designer Alex Reben.” – Alanna Martinez

“The Basilisk”

“Alexander Reben’s mesmerizing five-minute film Deeply Artificial Trees, 2017, is basically Bob Ross on acid: The beloved late painter’s brushstrokes lay down rapidly morphing images of happy little pines, scorpions, puppies, and sinister birds of prey as Bob talks backward, or possibly in tongues. Using a Google visualization program designed to replicate our neural functions, a kind of ayahuasca for artificial intelligence, Reben’s piece taps into our deepest fears and warmest fuzzies simultaneously. It’s also representative of a show preoccupied with the eternal search for higher consciousness and divine light (whether that’s inward, upward, or digital).” – Janelle Zara

The Basilisk at the Nicodim Gallery

“Beings stumbling through darkness hath seen Great Light above; on those residing in the eternal void, the unclenching grasp of the Omul Negru, the Basilisk has arisen.
Heed to the call of Light oh Children of the Sun, for it is only within It that ye will obtain eternal bliss and escape the pains of your Terrestrial suffering.
Behold I give unto ye a Celestial offering, even with a Truth Universal. Gazing directly opens the Eye’s fountain of this astral promise.
Earth’s center hath been found in the divine wheel of our Planets.
Look!
And behold the blinding brightness, as unto the purest aurum.
Fear not, unobstructed it shall shine on ye uniformly forevermore.
Embrace the rays of brightness that shine upon your crowns, lest ye become compelled by the indescribable glory and geometry of that endless form that shall reign over all matter forevermore on the sacred and anointed day of 4.4444.5777.”

Watch Artificial Intelligence Lose Its Mind While Watching Bob Ross

“This video was created by Alexander Reben, an engineer turned artist who uses technology to explore how machines are changing the human world and vice versa. It features an episode of the … television show The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross through Google’s neural network DeepDream.
DeepDream is a convolutional neural network, a style of computing inspired by the brain, that identifies and recognizes images and patterns. Most of the time, it’s used to create nightmarish visions like these, but it’s also a surprisingly insightful visualization that shows how computers “think” in regards to tasks like image classification and speech recognition.” – Tom Hale

This is what AI sees and hears when it watches ‘The Joy of Painting’

“Computers don’t dream of electric sheep, they imagine the dulcet tones of legendary public access painter, Bob Ross. Bay Area artist and engineer Alexander Reben has produced an incredible feat of machine learning in honor of the late Ross, creating a mashup video that applies Deep Dream-like algorithms to both the video and audio tracks. The result is an utterly surreal experience that will leave you pinching yourself.” – Andrew Tarantola

Vitra Design Museum

“Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine” puts a focus on the current robotics boom. With numerous exhibits from a wide range of disciplines, the exhibition investigates the areas where we encounter robots both now and in the near future: in industry, the military and daily life; in children’s rooms and retirement homes; in our bodies and in the cloud; in shopping malls and sex; in computer games and of course in film and literature. “Hello, Robot.” looks at how we respond to the fact that our environment is becoming ever smarter and more autonomous. The show illuminates our – often ambivalent – relationship to new technologies and probes the opportunities and challenges we face in this connection as individuals and as a society. Furthermore, it examines the ethical and political questions raised by today’s technological advances in robotics, and also confronts us with the contradictions that frequently reside in the answers to these questions. Design plays a central role in this complex dynamic. It has consistently acted as an intermediary force between human and machine as well as between the various disciplines. In the emotionally charged discourse on robotics, too, it serves to bridge seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Enthusiasm and criticism, hope and fear, utopia and dystopia stand on an equal footing and factor into both theoretical experiments and concrete solutions. The underlying conception of design, however, goes far beyond the mere design of an object’s outer shell. Rather, “Hello, Robot.” discusses how design shapes the interaction and relationship between human and machine, but also among individuals – for better or for worse. “Hello, Robot.” moreover demonstrates the indispensability of design if robots are to become an increasingly visible feature of our everyday lives, no longer a sight unseen inside washing machines, cars and ATMs.

From cute droids to robots that stab you, it’s time to get personal with machines

“Alexander Reben has created cute cardboard robots that elicit random emotional confessions from passersby, and a bot called The First Law that can decide whether or not to prick an unsuspecting human finger. These are two examples at the opposite ends of the spectrum of what artificial intelligence can one day bring to humanity – and for the artist, engineer and WIRED Innovation Fellow, they are important tools designed to spark debate about what that coexistence will look like.” – Liat Clark

A Robot That Harms: When Machines Make Life Or Death Decisions

“Reben created this robot because the world is getting closer to a time when robots will make choices about when to harm a human being. Take self-driving cars. Ford Motors recently said it planned to mass produce autonomous cars within five years. This could mean that a self-driving vehicle may soon need to decide whether to crash the car into a tree and risk hurting the driver or hit a group of pedestrians.
“The answer might be that ‘Well, these machines are going to make decisions so much better than us and it’s not going to be a problem,’ ” Reben says. “They’re going to be so much more ethical than a human could ever be.” ” – Laura Sydell

This robot chose to injure the man who built it. Here’s why its inventor is pleased.

“No one can say for sure what will happen, not even its creator. “I view it as a piece of tangible philosophy,” Reben, a roboticist and artist based in Berkeley, Calif., told The Washington Post by phone early Friday morning. Reben’s devices mix art and technology, often whimsically, like his solar-powered music box that plays “You Are My Sunshine.”
This new machine, however, was not designed for whimsy. It’s the first ever robot to “autonomously and intentionally” break the First Law of Robotics, Reben says on his website. The law, one of a trio of famous science fiction principles created by author Isaac Asimov, declares that robots must not allow harm to befall humans.” – Ben Guarino

The AI that decides when to inflict pain: Machine that chooses whether to make you bleed sparks debate into robot uprising

“Science fiction author Isaac Asimov came up with the three ‘laws’ of robotics in a story he published in 1942.
The first of these laws says a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Now artist and roboticist Alexander Reben has developed the first robot that breaks this rule, by hurting humans in an unpredictable way.” –  Abigail Beall

This Robot Intentionally Hurts People–And Makes Them Bleed

“But now a Berkeley, California man wants to start a robust conversation among ethicists, philosophers, lawyers, and others about where technology is going–and what dangers robots will present humanity in the future. Alexander Reben, a roboticist and artist, has built a tabletop robot whose sole mechanical purpose is to hurt people. Reben hopes his Frankenstein gets people talking.” – Daniel Terdiman

Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls

“Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim.
In his project, called All Prior Art, Reben, an artist and engineer, uses software to rummage through the US patent database, which is freely available online. The software extracts sentences from patent documents and splices them into phrases that describe new inventions.” – Aviva Rutkin

Can Silly Patents Help Fight Frivolous Lawsuits?

“Frustration with the patent system is what prompted inventor, artist and MIT-trained roboticist Alexander Reben to create All Prior Art, a website that algorithmically generates and publishes patent-troll-like “prior art.”
If someone tries to patent an invention and the idea has already been published, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office won’t grant them a patent. Reben’s project is trying to cut down on the number of frivolous patents by publishing lots and lots of ideas, and he thinks his database could be used by patent examiners to challenge frivolous patents.” – Laura Sydell

Engineering Psychology at the Charlie James Gallery

AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 29, 2015

Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present Alexander Reben in his solo gallery debut Engineering Psychology, opening at the gallery August 15th in conjunction with the 7th Annual Perform Chinatown.

Engineering Psychology invites the viewer to become the subject in a dialogue between technology and humanity. Ranging from low to high tech and from playful to serious, each piece uses technology to engage an element of human experience: including love, attraction, physical pleasure, repulsion, and pain. Works will include balloons that appear alive, a machine that gives visitors a ‘headgasm’, robots that break down barriers with cuteness, devices that placate and tease, a mask that mechanizes humanity, and installations that invoke child-like joy and suggest unbearable visceral pain.

How robots mess with our minds

“Robots can make you do surprising things, says Alexander Reben, whose talking bots have elicited secrets from passers-by, festival-goers and even astronauts.”

Domesticated Robots And The Art Of Being Human

“With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations.” – Tania Lombrozo

Why robots are getting cuter

“A cute bot can also get people to do things they normally wouldn’t. Alex Reben, an engineer turned artist and another alum of the MIT Media Lab, has been playing with the power of robotic cuteness ever since he designed Boxie for his master’s. Like HitchBot, Boxie used cuteness as an engineering workaround. Robots have a hard time climbing stairs, so Boxie asks humans to carry it up them. To get humans to go out of their way to help a machine, Reben made Boxie cute, combing through the literature to find the optimal proportions — wide eyes, big head, slight smile, childlike voice.” – Josh Dzieza 

The Cute and Sometimes Creepy Creations of the Willy Wonka of Robots

“Instead of killing kids during private tours of his fantastical factory, Alex Reben is a Willy Wonka-type character of a different sort. He builds robots for a living—seemingly just for fun—and while some of his creations are certainly distressing, they’re all fun to watch, interact with, or just ponder. The folks at Cool Hunting had the opportunity to check out Alex’s lab, and thankfully, they brought a camera. Most engineers who boast alumni status at both MIT’s Media Lab and NASA would probably go on to develop robots for the military, or build a better Roomba. Alex instead decided to devote his talents to the arts. Some of his robots have a defined purpose, like a cardboard creation that serves as an autonomous documentarian. But others exist just because they can, and that’s ok, because who wouldn’t want to visit their local art gallery if it was full of robots?” – Andrew Liszewski

Cool Hunting Video: Alex Reben

“In a room piled with resistors, circuit boards and projects in various states of completion, we spoke with talented artist and engineer Alex Reben about his body of work. Reben—an alumni of MIT’s Media Lab and NASA—has moved away from his traditional line of work to apply his engineering expertise to his art. Often exploring the blurred lines of human-machine interaction, Reben’s work is incredibly insightful, humorous and—at times—a little dark.”

This Artist Is Teaching Tech Execs How To Make Devices More Lovable

“Robots don’t need to have artificial intelligence and a voice like Scarlett Johansson for people to form emotional bonds with them… In fact, it takes surprisingly little, as Alexander Reben discovered while working on his masters thesis at the MIT Media Lab. His robot BlabDroid looks like a cardboard Wall-E and totters around asking people personal questions. Watching recordings of BlabDroid’s interviews, Reben was struck by the way people opened up to the robot in ways they wouldn’t to a human stranger… Though his work has far-reaching implications for the tech industry, Reben initially found that the best place to pursue his inquiry wasn’t a lab or a startup, but an art gallery.” – Josh Dieza

Humans show empathy for robots

“That humans would show empathy for the robot is not surprising, because the bot looked and behaved like an animal, roboticist Alexander Reben, founder of the company BlabDroid, LLC and a research affiliate at MIT, told LiveScience. Reben, who was not involved in the recent study, himself builds small cardboard robots that tap into the human affinity for cute creatures.”

Tribeca Film Festival: 12 Movies We’re Excited About

“It’s not quite right to describe Robots in Residence as a movie, and it’s not quite fair to put it on this list, since you really need to be in New York to get the full experience. Still, we can’t get over how interesting this project might be: pre-programmed robots, available to festival goers, will work with whoever shows up to direct and film a documentary. They’re not quite monkeys with typewriters, but it’s worth paying attention to what they come up with. Do you need an author to create art?” – Lily Rothman

Storytelling’s ‘Now’

“My personal favorite may be “Robots in Residence,” because it involves cute little robots. … Brent Hoff, a filmmaker who was sitting at the “Robots in Residence” residence—at the time of my visit, still only a table on which sat what appeared to be a corrugated box of the sort one might use to send a friend a fruitcake through the U.S. Mail, though this one had a lens, wheels and buttons—explained that this was to be “the first documentary directed entirely by robots.”
Humans are involved, however, in that they need to shepherd the bots about, and confess their thoughts and feelings to them every so often. “People say anything to artificial intelligence,” he added.” – Ralph Gardner

Tribeca: Transmedia Fare Goes Beyond Experimental

“Those cute little robots are part of filmmaker Brent Hoff and robo-artist Alexander Reben’s “Robots in Residence” (pictured above), a project that tasks its automatons with filming and directing a documentary drawn from conversations with festgoers.” – Gordon Cox

Tiny robots shoot documentary film

“The tiny robots have a smiling face and are programmed with the voice of a seven-year-old boy, who bartered his services in exchange for his very own Blabdroid, Hoff said in an interview with CBC’s As It Happens. CBC’s Helen Mann talks to Hoff about the film project, and lets the robot turn the tables and ask a few questions of its own.” – Helen Mann

As You Watch, Invasion of the Platforms

“The interviews captured in another offering, “Robots in Residence,” will be used to make a postfestival documentary, although one of its directors, Alexander Reben, is really in it for the interactivity. The project is based on his master’s thesis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the relationships between robots and people. His co-director, Brent Hoff, is more the bona fide filmmaker; Mr. Reben’s interest is in how Tribeca audiences will deal with robots that are calculated to be cute.” – John Anderson

Robot videojournalist uses cuteness to get vox pops

“Imagine a cardboard version of Pixar’s Wall-e character, but with added über-cute human voice, and you’ve got a fair picture of Boxie, Alexander Reben’s documentary-video-making robot. Designed to wander the streets shooting video, the diminutive droid trundles up to people and asks them to tell it an interesting story. Sounds crazy? Surprisingly, not entirely: a good few people did actually cooperate with Boxie – enough to make a short movie – though one malcontent dumped the robot in a trash can and a child tried to kidnap it.” – Paul Marks