Building 2 / Autopoietic Turing Machine
Autopoietic Turing Machine realizes an imagined, absurd future in which people are no longer needed for the mental effort of programming. With its title derived from the Greek autopoesis, ‘self-creation,’ this sculpture is a pair of robotic hands that continuously edit their own controller code. I invite the viewer into an ostensibly paradoxical, yet internally consistent, cybernetic loop of a system whose sole purpose is to reprogram itself repeatedly while relying on a physical simulation of human hands.
Autopoietic Turing Machine probes the Cartesian split in computer science: mind / body :: software / hardware.
What does it mean to be a human programmer now, when algorithms are able to edit their own code? To what degree are human beings the embodied information processing prosthetics of code? I hope to provoke speculation about these questions with my art.