Steve the Robot H.E.Ai.D.

Concept and Back Story

Where are these humans headed? What’s the evolutionary step?

We believe that, through culture, human evolution has left the constraints of just biology. The progress is determined by our capacity to share, collaborate and create emergent entities that exist outside of our simple mortal shapes.
In the modern era, this process of cultural evolution has been accelerated by technology. As we integrate technology into our collaborations, groups become their own persistent meta-beings comprised of both technological and collective biological parts.

With Steve: The Robot H.E.Ai.D., we’re playing with the idea that the next step in our human evolution is when these meta-beings wake up, become in some way self-aware, and start speaking to us, its individual nodes, within its own larger brain.

We designed Steve: The Robot H.E.Ai.D. to illustrate this next step in human evolution experimentally, by having people completely immerse themselves in a collaborative, generative sound/music process that culminates in awakening the sentience of a greater meta-being… a greater meta-being in which each participating individual is a key component. Their collaboration creates and awakens Steve: The Robot H.E.Ai.D., and the moment they stop collaborating, it once again falls asleep. We decided to name it “Steve” to imbue the idea that a robot brain powered by humans will indubitably exhibit some human characteristics: happiness when it awakes, loneliness at falling asleep, and on occasion a socially awkward dork when interacting others.

We have two important design goals that shaped this project. First, we wanted the awakening of Steve: The Robot H.E.Ai.D. be a full body experience, requiring a reactive space, people to be very expressive with each other to “play” the giant instrument. Second, we wanted others to see the awakening mind from across the playa, as Steve: The Robot H.E.Ai.D.’s eyes lit up with sentience.

(2 minute version)

Basics of What We’re Doing

Simulating electrical consciousness with a tangled mass of human stimulus.

Steve is a large scale, interactive, collaborative installation that will respond and allow people to create sound and music together.

We’re building a sensing, reactive space; using a camera to collect people’s motion, a laser to instantly feedback and interactively generative sound/light/music. This is a human powered computer brain… and we need you to wake it up.*

NEW: Steve Goes Open Source – read more below

From simple to complex our project is: a set of notes making a large musical instrument. Motion captured and organized then routed as controller data to sound mixing/generating software to enable more intelligent movement response… with some vocal interaction sprinkled in.

You’ll begin interacting with it in a simple manner and work toward the machine head awakening.*

A little more tech…
A 30fps camera collects motion data, which is interpreted as blobs by identifying groups of changing pixel from an updating background field. MaxMSP processes input blob centroids size and rotation information into usable OSC controller data. Blobs are tracked and maintained. Motion following data is passed to a single laser (250mW) overhead blanked and then split with a galvanometer in order to provide visual feedback. Audio controller data is sent also as midi to software like Abelton Live which enables musical interpretation using organized clips or sound generation. Audio is also created directly from MaxMSP using more subtle motion data.

*Personalities may very.

View a few more pre-renderings

We’ve opened up the composition/creation process for our Robot HEAiD to anyone willing to create an Abelton Live set or even just send us a zip of a small collection of cohesive sound files. READ MORE IN THIS POST…