Jessica Field's home page and project archive

Artist Statement

I create immersive environments that address the social issues concerning the creation of Artificial Intelligence and its connection to human behaviours, expectations and desires.

My work is driven by my curiosity in exploring and researching how humans define themselves as being more or less than the sum of their parts. More to the point, I am interested in how technology, particularly artificial life research, influences and defines how people see themselves and the things they create. The sciences encourage us to expand our knowledge by the pursuit of physically defining how we work in the world we live in so we can understand our place in life. Spirituality encourages us to expand our spirituality to become more than our physical limitations so we can feel content with our existence in the world. My artistic practice investigates how these two opposing approaches to understanding the world can be mixed together to create contradictory statements that show the complexity and diversity of being a conscious being. These two conflicting methods of finding contentment in existence is an important theme in all my projects as it creates a dual impression that the robot conveys to the viewer; the viewer will either take the interpretation that the artist is convinced she is creating a conscious robot, or feel that the artist is completely against the scientific pursuit of creating artificial consciousness.

The functions embedded in the programs of my robots determine how my concepts will be developed and performed for the viewer. The medium of robot creation is very advantageous for showing or acting out ideas in a way where the robot is capable of choosing each method of reaction. Thus, a robot is a wonderful tool as it is like an actor you direct using software - I can provide for a latitude of behaviours and choices in the program so the robots can demonstrate independence and behave on their own when shown to the public.

In building robots, I limit myself to using very rudimentary sensors so that my robots' behaviours are always based on simple relationships to their environment. I also program in a low-level language, assembler. This choice to program my robots in this way makes it difficult for me to program my robots my way; there is always a compromise, a sort of dialogue, where I have to work around the machine's architecture and understand how it works with exterior sensor data in order to create its behavioural responses. This allows me to learn about the robot I want to create so I can understand its nature and how it sees the world in its mathematical way. This relationship I have with the robot informs my understanding of the robot I am creating so I can reflect this "identity" into its behaviour. Thus, the robot behaviour appears familiar, like an animal, yet unfamiliar, since it is an artificial life-form. This controversy is an example of how I like to make my robots appear as "conscious beings" while making it blatantly apparent in their physicality that they are not "conscious" at all.

Robots are an interesting tool for creating characters that can play out roles. The roles that the robots "act" out can appease the stereotyped roles of what we presume a robot should be, or these roles can become distorted in such a way where they appear to have flawed personalities and demonstrate behaviours outside of the viewer's expectations. I am very interested in how our concept of a robot carries several preconceived notions. A robot installation is meant to entertain the viewer so the viewer becomes the center of the robot's attention. In practical applications, the robot works for us to make our work easier and more efficient. In my work, I question these ideas by building physically impractical robots that behave for themselves and for each other so that they are completely separate from the viewer like animals caged in a zoo. Thus, the robots I create become performances, each robot has a tragic flaw that is played out with the others in a narrative to show the consequences of that behaviour on the robot's existence.