Role in Project
I created and programmed all the electronic interactive and sensory elements of the Idiotic Agents.
Credits
Artist: Maria Tsilogianni
Description
Idiotic agents, as animate objects interacting with each other and with humans, are occupying domestic environments to expand human-machine entanglements beyond functionality. Challenging constituted models of ‘intelligence’, they exhibit absurd and unpredictable behaviors, provoking inhabitants to explore them, to figure them out and build relationships with them. An agent that has a thing for parties and bubbles, obsessed over one particular song that randomly disturbs moments of silence; an agent constantly asking for care but equally caring for others, that loves singing to plants or sunbathing for hours, one that best expresses itself through weather phenomena; agents that like to be chatty with each other through a language incomprehensible to humans, and agents with secret love affairs. But most importantly, idiotic agents are acting on their very own terms instead of being commanded. Their discursive materiality speaks for their inner workings, manifesting their non-human agency that emerges to converse with humans and other objects around home in ways that are not pre-scripted but rather open-ended.
But there are further well-hidden stories behind them. Idiotic agents were constructed in the margins of industrial companies with large-scale production lines based in Greece; a company collecting and reusing plastic from the Mediterranean Sea to produce their own recycled-plastic materials, a heavy industry producing metal components from screws and gears to beams and fireplaces, and a local marble company specializing in building “our last homes”, quoting here one of the employees working on the construction of graves. Working with technicians and crafts-people on the sides of large-scale production lines that were genuinely motivated by their own personal excitement for something out-of-the-ordinary, and willing to take up tasks that others rejected (due to greater profit from clients with bigger and easier commissions), each idiotic agent has a material story to say – one that is also representative of the collaborative practices behind their materialization. All components were carefully thought of and produced one-off to avoid complaints about me distracting the production line. This process acknowledges and embraces the ‘risk’ of irreversible imperfections, letting even the tiniest flaws become part of each object’sinner life.
Maria Tsilogianni