David
L. McMullen recently posted on the Inventables website a featured project that
involved the use of hand moldable plastic to form the facial features of an
android. The plastic used here is a true thermoplastic, able to be heated and
re-formed any number of times without degradation to the material. With a low
melting temperature of only 136-140°F (58-60°C), this material is ideal for tooling with the hand
and can be used for a plethora of applications as David’s use here as robot
hair demonstrates.
David L. McMullen's robotic hair made from hand moldable plastic
A
question we might ask that arises from this use of hand moldable plastics is
simple enough: why give an android hair in the first place? Facial features
serve no immediate or practical utility on these designs. Under a strict credo
of form following function, such details may even seem superfluous. Indeed,
David’s plastic hair may not be as practically useful as say the android’s
limbs or digits. But I would argue that this facial detailing is of important
psychological significance in relation to the so-called “uncanny valley”.
In
the fields of robotics and 3D graphics, the term uncanny valley is used often
when referring to the surface level aesthetics of a given design. The term essentially
refers to a state in which the design in question hovers between the threshold
of “barely human” and “fully human”. Examples of these uncanny aesthetics might
include Weta Digital’s photorealistic graphics in the recent film The Adventures of Tintin (2011) or the
actroid models developed by both the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology
and Osaka University.
Uncanny designs from Weta Digital and students at the Osaka University in Osaka, Japan
Designs
falling into this threshold of human likeness are often met with an anxious
response. When tooling an aesthetic that has slipped into the valley, robotics
engineers and graphic designers alike attempt to push the image of their
product into full blown simulacrum or pull the aesthetic back into something
that is obviously other than human.[1]
The overall design of David’s android falls more into the category of barely
human. It possesses the basic biped anatomy of a human being but the exposed
electronics show it to be anything but. And
yet there is the hair. The plastic facial detailing on David’s android
pushes the overall design closer to the uncanny valley, an area of
representation that normative robotics design tells us is a faux pas.
On
the other hand, we might see the uncanny valley as symbolic territory that is
in need of exploration, particularly in today’s climate of accelerated
technological advancement. Elsewhere in the design community, the creation of
artificial life and intelligence is progressing in leaps and bounds. Advanced
computer coding, for instance, is now able to produce entirely immaterial digital
bots that can exhibit complex behavior when performing tasks with incredibly
large sets of data. These bots execute actions that can produce immense
ramifications but go about their work in the black box installations of server
farms and digital networks. These
algorithmically produced creatures go about their work with no face.
MIT professor Kevin Slavin's 2011 TedTalk explores the idea of renegade stock market algorithms
It
would seem then that by pushing robotics farther into the uncanny valley, as
David has done with his hand molded plastic hair, we may give a familiar skin
to an unfamiliar being. This face may induce anxiety and even fear in the user,
as a traditional response to the uncanny valley would predict. But to me, the
greater fear is an artificial intelligence that I cannot see let alone
recognize. David’s android, with its slick plastic haircut, looks actually to
be quite a friend to human and machine alike.
[1] For an example of these
adjustments, think of the replicants in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Bladerunner versus Dyson’s upcoming DC06
robotic vacuum cleaner.
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