Can technology be art? The question has been gaining traction, especially as artists and installations melding the digital and the physical have entered the public milieu. On the third floor of the John Crerar Library, where UChicago’s computer science department is based, one answer can be found from Ken Nakagaki and the AxLab. The lab is one of UChicago’s many computer science research labs, but is distinguished by its unique specialty in tangible technology.
The “Ax” in “AxLab” stands for “actuated,” which has two meanings: to put into mechanical motion and to move to action. The lab uses both meanings of the word, building “actuated” technology to bring us out of our screens and into our lives. This clever word choice, which summarizes the philosophy of the lab, is meaningful for Nakagaki, the AxLab’s director and an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. He believes the actuated technology that AxLab is researching can actuate people to enact change in the world by changing their relationship with technology.
At its core, AxLab’s mission is about creating a better future relationship with technology. In the world the AxLab is building, technology blends with our physical spaces, breaking free from the flat screens that suck us in. For Nakagaki and the AxLab, more interactive, physical forms of technology can help bring us back into our tangible reality.
Because their technology is all about physicality, it is often surprisingly artistic. Take AeroRigUI, which imagines how we can better use wasted space through robots which play on a ceiling and dispense lengths of string in a unified ballet. The robots demonstrate technology’s ability to change our relationship with our built environment, but they are also aesthetic and playful. The robots themselves have an appearance of dancing fishing spools, which whir around to allow their held objects to float and sink.
Threading Space unites spatial interaction between the ceiling and the floor by connecting threads between them, allowing new expression through kinetic sculptures that can turn themselves in knots. Viewing the project leaves one with a powerful impression of unity in technology. It uses complicated robotics with simple ropes to create a unique artistic installation. The sculpture requires a great degree of precision since the robots have to move in perfect synch to keep the strings taught, and the result is a dance that rests on the razor’s edge of failure as the robots stutter around each other, binding themselves further together. This requires a great degree of thought into how to use technology and the physical space it inhabits.
Buoyancé explores novel ways to implement helium for robots to float in midair. This description does not convey the ethereal dancing balloons that you see when this technology is artistically showcased. A simple explanation about the project doesn’t do justice to the beautiful possibilities that it might hold for the future. Just describing the project as floating helium robots doesn’t elicit the same excitement for future possibilities that Nakagaki’s elegant exhibition evokes.
To better understand how art plays a role in his creative process for innovation, I spoke with Nakagaki. He said that the ability to switch perspectives between an artist and a researcher is extremely important: “It’s really cool to have an interdisciplinary view. You can wear a hat of the researcher, but once you wear a hat of the artist, you start to find a new value in research and technology.” Nakagaki finds that his different roles tend to build off each other, which is why he doesn’t really view art and technology as two separate things. “When I’m doing research, I come up with a new idea that could be used for art. While I’m doing art, it gives me a new idea about technology.” Nakagaki is a believer in the power of art and technology to see new perspectives and believes it can be useful to get people thinking about the world they’re going to live in—especially what the spaces they’ll inhabit will look like.
Nakagaki also believes in the ability of art to reach a wider audience and bring different perspectives into conversations about the future. This interest in interactivity began in Tokyo, where Nakagaki was inspired by a range of interactive media and art festivals. He realized he could use interactivity and art to go beyond the strictly pragmatic side of research. “I want [my exhibitions] to be a vehicle to look at the future, discuss the future, and give people inspiration about what the future could be,” Nakagaki said. It is his aim that his prototypes serve as “torches” to “illuminate the future” and inspire others to think differently about it.
Much of what Nakagaki envisions is physicalizing our interaction with technology. With most of our engagement with technology now on a flat screen, Nakagaki misses the innovation and variety in some earlier technologies like flip phones. At its core, what’s lost in this change is creativity. The internet, much like the screens that it takes place on, has become too smooth for Nakagaki. It’s too easy to stay online. Projects from the AxLab like the Attention Receipts strive to use physical objects to remind us of the real costs of the digital world. Using tangible interfaces in a creative and thought-provoking way can increase the tension in our relationship with technology, pushing us to spend more time in reality.
In our age of uncertainty about the future role AI and technology will play in our lives, Nakagaki explores a more optimistic vision. This vision is one where technology is brought out into reality instead of pulling us further away from it. Communicating this vision is no easy task. But Nakagaki understands that the best way to do so is by “wearing the hat of an artist.”
