Swiss-Artists-In-Labs Award: Residency at Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich, Switzerland, July-December 2004 and ongoing collaboration.

archipelago.ch depicts a tour of a newly discovered series of AI robotic research labs as “islands” and iterates the discovery, analysis and interpretation of their terrain and indigenous creatures. The creatures inhabiting each island are the idiosyncratic robots evolved by each researcher from their choice of morphologies occurring in nature, i.e., a insect eye, mouse whiskers discerning textures by touch, etc. The voiceover tour of this archipelago is the text by Charles Darwin from Chapter 17 of the Voyage of the Beagle-Galapagos.

archieplago.ch resulted from Wortzel’s 6-month 2004 artists residency at the AILab as a recipient of a Swiss Artists-in-Labs Award. I was fortunate to be embedded in the day-to-day research methodologies and manifestations. Each researcher, in his or her own laboratory, devised idiosyncratic robots based on a bottom-up methodology rather than top-down task orientation.