CW: Definitely... In a way OUTRACE is a robotic reality TV show where everyone is invited to be the beast master, the poet and the graffiti vandal. Everyone has to engage, and for that to happen we have to make the hardware as complex and as simple as possible – at the same time. The most exciting aspect about robotic car plants is the degree to which the entire process is controlled by human beings, from end to end – by the engineers, developers and programmers who conceptualize, code, build and maintain these hypercomplex processes. OUTRACE is an insight into contemporary virtual mechanics a metaphorical robot cell rather than a literal one.
To achieve this, you've recast the robots as actors performing in front of a virtual audience. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin dissects the differences between a stage actor's and a screen actor's performances, their relationships with the respective audiences, and the influence of the camera as mediator between actor and audience. I wonder what Benjamin would have made of OUTRACE...
CW: With OUTRACE, the film set is situated in Trafalgar square, the audience is a remote, global body of individuals, and each member of the audience takes control of the set to produce media for a completely new type of stage that Benjamin couldn't have foreseen: the Facebook wall. The mediatic representation of any object, performance or event is many times more powerful than the physical event itself and OUTRACE is essentially a mechanical device intended to amplify that effect.
How about the performance-oriented aspect of the installation? In a way the experience of someone physically present is tantalizingly incomplete, unless they happen to be carrying an iPhone...
CW: OUTRACE is an extremely complex project. It's an experiment in empowering people to take direct control over high-tech manufacturing technology. It's also a metaphor for what we see as the inevitable result of the reforms that every part of western society, state and industry will go through: an era of direct connectivity. We see OUTRACE is an evolution of a previous project, Breeding Tables, in which we took control over an industrial process to the degree that we could handle giant steel sheets and bend them with heavy equipment much as one would make paper models. The limitation was that the design process of each table wasn't shared – there was no end user involvement in the design decisions.
RK: We've always worked towards breaking the boundaries of standard production processes underlying physical objects. If you look at how the workspace has changed over the past 20 years, there has been a massive evolution in the way information affects everything in our lives, particularly in terms of physical production. The paradox is that it's become even more impalpable and remote - almost no-one is aware of the complexity of these production processes.
How exactly does this flow of information from user to installation back to user work?
RK: The plinth the robots stand on actually contains an array of servers that receive the 70-character messages being sent by users, and the robots work their way through this queue of messages one by one. I should point out that they're not simply served up - we want to produce great videos, so the team will select the very best of those inputted on the website, and the robots draw them consecutively, produce a set of videos and push them back to YouTube and the Facebook group. Another interesting point is that robots haven't evolved much over the last 20 years – neither physically nor in terms of their software. The robots that we're using are relatively cheap to buy, but incredibly expensive to programme and therefore to use, simply because programming them is such an esoteric form of knowledge – everything's hidden.
CW: We also see this as a prototype for a future in which we can actually plug into heavy machinery and output products. This is basically what we did with Breeding Tables – we tried to achieve a level of control over laser-cutting machines that amounted to the same control you can get over an Epson printer when you attach it to your computer. It's still a very hard thing to do, but in the future we will have machines that can be controlled through processes not dissimilar to when you use an API to tap into information on Facebook - where you basically plug into years and years of development work on code to run a robot. The collage of technologies and information in this installation is a virtual presentation of that very direct interaction between the remote user and the factory – or, in this case, the robotic manufacturing cell.
After the deflation of the late '90s obsession with just-in-time manufacturing and mass customisation, do you think it's still possible to argue that these are technologies of the future? Aren't they something the 21st century takes for granted?
RK: It is only now, in the age of hyperconnectivity, that the potential of numerically controlled machines and robotic automation – both of which have actually been around since the '70s, is being unleashed. And that's where we see huge potential. The use of these robots is less and less limited by their physical size or strength, or their abilities to manipulate materials, and more and more by the glass ceiling of the programming expense. But in the next few years we'll reach a tipping point, after which the situation will be more similar to that of the personal computer you'll see people hacking small robots or modifying inexpensive devices on their own, simply because they can, and because the methods for controlling them originate more and more in open source code.
Do you think the future of social networking is a greater degree of integration with production and physicality, mechanical processes?
CW: I think you can say that. Take the iconic works of architecture – almost no-one has seen the real thing. Instead, people have seen image representations of these buildings, and that's true of every form of cultural production today. 99% of it is media, while the physical buildings are not that relevant at the end of the day - it's all about the media produced around them. For all intents and purposes they could actually not even exist. We take what the automotive industry already does – allowing you to pick and choose the specifics of a product, relying on huge robotic arms to assemble it – and essentially do the same for images. When you purchase a car, you spark off a fantastically complex series of processes, each with different implications – you trigger effects on the manufacturing cycle, on the supply chain, even on the company's marketing strategy... There are over 20,000 interactions within their systems once you click the 'buy' button for a car. The automotive industry uses these processes on a very large scale, but if you scale that conceptual methodology down to a more manageable dimension, you end up with something pretty similar to what we have here. We believe that in the next 24 months we'll be able to integrate the production of physical objects, as well as media, into this logic.
RK: One could also argue that when it comes to production, this discussion about social media and social interaction becomes incredibly didactic, or incredibly dogmatic – there's a real either/or attitude. There's an assumption that as designers our role is to decide the perfect end result, and as a consumer your role is to accept that. The processes emerging today allow for a much more complex scenario - rather than decide one way or the other, we can explore and inhabit the boundary between the role of the designer and the end-user.
If one pushes that argument to the extreme, what emerges is a new definition of the designer – no longer understood as an originator of predefined objects, but a creator of processes through which end-users are able to define their own products. Do you see yourselves as pioneers of this new genre of designer?
CW: We should be completely clear about this – handing over total control to users, which is something some designers have attempted to do, leads to pretty disastrous results from a design perspective. You could say that end users need to be given the tools, or rather the frameworks, and these participatory frameworks are getting more and more complicated to design – just look at Facebook. Having said that, a framework system like Facebook is something very different from the broad public taking over design. In the end, a designer can only provide a fragment of real authorship and creative control over the final context and use of his product since unlike a work of art, a design object is inherently functional. The consumer automatically edits both the designer's intentions and framework by selecting and using an item as part of a greater puzzle. The mosaic put together by each end user to create an interior, home or habitat is necessarily unique and greater than the sum of its parts.
RK: One could even say that these frameworks are nothing new – the modernist project itself was about defining a software of sorts, or at least a set of rules – a kind of program to run. It was an incredibly effective formula, and because of that modernism succeeded in propagating among designers in a certain way. But today the conceptual landscape is much more complicated – each product becomes the definition of a certain set of rules. And so our challenge becomes to set up the boundaries between the producer and end user.
What do you consider to be the criteria of OUTRACE's success as a project in London?
CW: The project's success here will definitely hinge on the extent to which people decide to embrace OUTRACE as a platform and a tool for activism, vandalism, expressions of love, hate – and all kinds of personal opinion.