Installation, workshops
Year: 2009
Authors: Kruno Jost, Ricardo Palmieri, Paloma Oliveira and Mateus Knelsen
Exhibited in: 2009 Vivo Arte.Mov Festival (Locative Media Award Winner)

CultureRobot (CR) is a creative and political platform, which culminates in a collectively built art installation. The project is originally conceived by Kruno Jost and Ricardo Palmieri, and its fourth version received the Locative Media Award in the 2009 Vivo Arte.Mov Festival, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. For this version, Paloma Oliveira and I were invited to contribute on a series of workshops and for the assembly of the installation that was exhibited in the 104 Cultural Space, from 11 to 14th of November of that year.

The process in CR begins with open and collaborative mapping workshops , in order to understand and locate the social and political games, the imaginary of particular locations, and everything else that escapes the traditional cartographic representations of urban space. During the workshops, exercises of reflection concerning interest points are proposed, with participants producing audiovisual material (photos, videos, text, sound) which are then mapped according to their occurrences. This mapping reveals “invisible” patterns, areas of interest, conflict regions, borders and social taboos, adding different textures to conventional city map representations by adding layers of information from the expressions that arise during the workshops. The result is a map with markings of the points of interest, projected on the installation floor space. On top of this projected map, a handmade robot – also built during the workshops with participants – browses randomly through the space. Eventually, the robot crosses these points of interest, and over these points, geotagged videos, texts and images are projected. The audio for the material is also reproduced in the installation space. The robot often passes through several points simultaneously, and thus, the path of the robot generates unique compositions of the audiovisual material available in the database, remixes that are the result of an automatic strolling.

The whole process of workshops and installation is documented. All the tools and methods used in the workshop – including the robot – are open source and well documented on the web, for free replication. For more information about the project, visit the project’s official website.

CultureRobot is an artwork that has as much focus on the process of creation as it has on the final representation with interactive and participative action/installation. CR process starts with workshops that are open to everyone who wants to participate in collaborative mapping, examining, wondering, experiencing, researching and trying to understand cities, parks, beck- alleys, countries, borders, cultures, people… CR is open to any way of tracing and tracking that might be involved, from most simple drawing to complicated graph representing social interconnections. CR is social act of establishing an understanding.

CultureRobot 4.0 was exhibited at Culture Center “104” during Artemov festival in Belo Horizonte between 11th and 14th November 2009. Workshops where local participants could expand their understanding on the urban space they live in and create audio and video materials collected during walks in the metropolitan area was part of Electronica festival. more detailed information

Project created by Kruno Jost and Ricardo Palmieri, with collaboration of Mateus Knelsen and Paloma Oliveira for the 0.4/ 4.0 version. This version was awarded as Locative Media art 2009 by festival Vivo artemov.