corpuscleConnections::an_afferent_analysis

CODE + SENSORY NETWORK

This work used 5 force sensor resistors to pick up pressure inputs from tactile participants. The sculpture algorithmically processed the input - the amount of force, the number of inputs, the location - using a model inspired by biological mechanisms of processing tactile input. In particular, the idea that greater force = greater pain - with pain thresholds varying in location, and incorporating the perceptive difference felt by c-fibre vs alpha delta fibre stimulation. Also the gate-control theory of pain was implemented, where light tactile experience in conjunction with a painful stimuli lessened the perception of pain.

The fleshy membrane outputted a text based response to the tactile experience. The words were poetic, and constructed with the help of chatGPT. It used the imagined experience of being constructed - the cutting, eyelet adding, glueing, welding, grinding, soldering - to convey metaphor based understandings of pleasure or pain.

In addition, a mood was embedded into the code. Using a counter, the code remembered the number of times it had been touched ‘badly’. If the sculpture was mishandled too much, it would enter an endless while loop of pain, outputting only existential expressions of hurt. An endless while loop is one of chatGPT’s conceptions of AI hell.

SCULPTURE

Buttery insulation with pink flesh slices encased in copper were used in the work to represent pacinian corpuscles, an afferent ending responsible for feelings of pressure. Insulation, the buffer in constructed houses, acted as the fatty phospholipids in cellular membranes, and the copper the ion transporting shell. The natural organic polymer of latex was used for it’s fleshy vulnerability and linkage with rubber in electronic skin designs.

This exhibition was presented at Post Office Projects, Port Adelaide, South Australia. It was supported by a Helpmann residency at George st Studios and ArtSA through POP.

Photo credit:: Paige Glancey

TXT :: Hen Vaughn

Darting between studies in neuroscience and sculpture, and drawing from experiences as a tradie and metalworker, Anika Gardner gleans, programs and stitches in search of new syntheses. ‘Corpuscle connections’ is a sinuous body of work forged in the space between these diverse practices and modes of inquiry.

At its core, the exhibition responds to the emergence of soft machines - robots and haptic interfaces increasingly designed with flexible and adaptable tissues referencing human skin. The concept of introducing nociception in such interfaces - the neural capacity to discern and respond to stimuli such as touch and temperature shifts - is Gardner’s particular curiosity. With recent research increasing popular awareness of the body’s storage of traumatic events, and its passage through generations due to epigenetics, the ability for robotic intelligences to feel and respond to pain adds further ethical complications.

From this complexity emerges Bip 2.0 - the second version of a project begun in Blanca, Spain. Bip is a lengthy plane of patchworked rubber, a soft machine ready to assert boundaries with coded poetic commands. Their surface is an experiment in biomimicry, with tissue programmed to respond to trauma, creating a provocation around agency, intimacy and consent in a malleable material future.

On latex pools several cultural associations. As a pliable and wearable surface, it mediates a range of interactions in haptically charged spaces - on either end, the clinic (gloves) and the dungeon (fetish wear). Gardner’s use of latex is both rough and tender, rerouting its often-industrial applications to signal new forms of material kinship [1) - Gardner’s handwritten code forms a tattoo on Bip’s skin, emphasising touch as transformation.

Alongside latex, Gardner’s use of pink insulation, steel and sensors echo the material language of building sites, the metalworker’s studio and the laboratory. All elements contrast, like cells, by their degrees of permeability. The body of the exhibition, in fleshy hues, is dense, absorbent, sleek, thin, fragile, possessing boundaries that could yield or threaten friction. With increasing automation of labour and the advent of purpose-built ‘sex robots’, business and pleasure will not be immune from questions of human-machine consent, a reality which Gardner invokes at both industrial and cellular scales.

‘Corpuscle connections’ celebrates and complicates nascent science and technology, focusing less on Chat-GPT’s cerebral exchanges and the abstract dispersion of the Cloud, in favour of the physical. Gardner returns our attention to the body and the cellular space of sensation, advocating for feeling through human-machine interaction with sensitivity and renegade vigour.

By Hen Vaughan

[1] Clementine Edwards and Kris Dittel (eds.) ‘The Material Kinship Reader’, Onomatopee, 2022.