| Artist Julius Popp’s work explores human perception and consciousness. He seeks to increase the human capacity for interaction by building seemingly simple, autonomous devices and by bringing them together within controlled environments where their exchange can be witnessed, recorded and studied. The incorporation of complex systems—created with the help of the German Fraunhofer Institute, the University of Leipzig and MIT’s computer and artificial intelligence laboratory—for the resolution of a range of unknowns in the field of cybernetics,… |  |
Social Reformation Through Intelligent Spherical Robots – Christos Ganos
Artist Julius Popp’s work explores human perception and consciousness. He seeks to increase the human capacity for interaction by building seemingly simple, autonomous devices and by bringing them together within controlled environments where their exchange can be witnessed, recorded and studied. The incorporation of complex systems—created with the help of the German Fraunhofer Institute, the University of Leipzig and MIT’s computer and artificial intelligence laboratory—for the resolution of a range of unknowns in the field of cybernetics, is what establishes Popp’s oeuvre, and also what brings him his success and international recognition. His micro.adam & micro.eva work, for example, is composed of self-conditioned, semitransparent constructions, which generate simple “bodily proposals” from the very immediacy with which they enter into contact.
With the help of these institutions, Popp and his team spearheaded the exploration and discovery of the very first modi operandi et vivendi of self-conscious systems. Julius Popp re-establishes the famous cogito ergo sum with cogito
ergo creare ergo doctum. The installation, micro.spheres, allows visitors not only to stimulate this “naturartificial,” intelligent environment by entering it, but also to interact, teach and learn from it. His Bit.fall, alongside other works at the “Nuit Blanche” exhibition in Paris in 2005, consisted of full-on technological wizardry. It was a first-class installation reasserting the Heraclitean idea of the endless flow in our chaotic post-urban societies, creating a constant and constantly changing, beaming rehabilitation of liquid information. With Macro.Perpendiculars, the individual is reduced to a molecule of social practice, a source of energy that resonates in space, harmonizing with artificially intelligent constructions, all unified in a process of fleeting stabilization. Once more, a synaesthetic condition is created, targeting the singularity of the plural. A human is just one parameter in a system of four synchronized, oscillating constructions.
Since we are living in a time of informational hybridization, of crossbreeding, where technology acts as the enrichment of art, we need to understand the basics, the elementary rules of behavior and social interaction. This offers us a constant—a static place and a reference point that we can turn to when we feel lost, alienated, spatially dislocated, a-formal, a-scalar or dissolved. We need this understanding, this fundamental knowledge in order to step on it. We need this understanding as the innermost energy for our entropic growth, to catalyze and fuel our potentials, as the setting for our unfolding, equilibrating extension. And it is with Julius Popp’s works that we are one step closer to achieving this operative future landscape, to understanding our chaotic way of living.
