Michael
Soroka
Artist modification of an image from Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett
Hello, for many of you this is the first time we have met and while I would like to properly introduce myself, I only have a few minutes of your attention to share an awesome idea with you, demonstrate credibility, and connect hundreds of years of art and technology to a fabric technology you have invented. If you find that you have questions, please read my bio or look around this website and I think you’ll have a sense of what I bring to art in the modern age.
I’ll share the technical details in the following sections but first allow me to introduce the Cuttlefish Ballet. Reliant upon the development of a Google Jacquard enabled Robot Skin of sensors and actuators, Cuttlefish is a dance performance that highlights the contemporary interaction of man and machine, of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and of the relationship between ephemeral and analytical data. The costumes made of Jacquard enabled Robot Skin developed in this residency display color and texture, sense the environment and the performer, enforce posture and position, and communicate with a Hive Coordinator. The Hive is a system of algorithms that monitor properties of the local and distributed audience, and their past, present, and predicted future behaviors using machine learning. Together the Robot Skin and the Hive create a novel set of movements and displays that can only exist in the moment they are created, with the results of their collaboration and the audience response feeding into a new tensor for the algorithms to learn from for future performance. The Cuttlefish Ballet is a real-time performance with stage direction issued live from the Hive informed by the context of the moment.
Mechanical Chromatophore Schematics
Like the animal skin, the Cuttlefish Robot Skin is an expressive and autonomic surface capable of interfacing with the organism that wears it and the environment. The skin is made of three layers, the dermis, the epidermis, and the hypodermis which is brought to reality through the conductive Jacquard fibers acting as sensory neurons that work through all three layers. The dermis is a layer of loose ends of Jacquard fibers that sense temperature, pressure, vibration, and touch, interwoven with a transparent waterproof material that myelinates and bundles the Jacquard receptors. This waterproof material sits on top of the epidermis, the layer of the Cuttlefish Robot Skin responsible for the brilliant display of color. This chromatic layer is made of Jacquard conductors woven onto a triangular pattern of a nickle titanium alloy shape memory alloy welded to elastic bundles of translucent color and reflectors that can be stretched into a much larger shape. These mechanical chromatophores can be scaled, layered, and distributed to create myriad of color and reflection controlled at a cellular level. Finally the hypodermis layer made primarily of inflatable molded flexible microporous silicon manufactured with embedded Jacquard fibers for sensing pressure and temperature is attached to the epidermis to create the texture and stiffness that orients the epidermis layer and limits the movement of the body that lies beneath. This system creates the Cuttlefish Robot Skin. It can be cut into patterns and sewn into forms. When complete it can be connected to any network, internal or external, through the Hive Controller.
Chromatophores
The dance of the cuttlefish is complex. To localize, to attract, to frighten, to communicate, these are the movements of the cuttlefish and they are the movements of the ballet. Like the cephalopod, the environment and the context of the moment informs the movements and display of the dancers.
Convert circuit layout to Jacquard weave on a 3D surface with the help of Grasshopper and Rhinoceros CAD tools
Schematics of aperture layout and motion controller