Neurotic at the ICA

Neurotic at the ICA

28 July, 2008
by: Robin

As a young man, artist Fiddian Warman tells us, his thing was punk. What with a name straight out of Waugh (or maybe Star Wars), put hand in hand with a creative disposition, the young Fiddian must have had the normal share of trouble from schoolboy thugs. There's half a chance that like others, his enthusiasm for punk was part admiration for the music's self-appointed freedom of speech and partly to do with its power to translate, through a vivid form of expression, his own frustrations.

As managing director of Soda, a company that creates educational tools and fun-looking software playthings, Warman successfully fuses art, technology and business; but it's Fiddian as a punk fan that's presented as the key to this latest (independent) project. In order to explore the neurology of taste and pleasure, and our empathetic responses to music, a software engineer, a computational biologist and a neurologist have helped Warman devise neural networks capable of analysing music – essentially computing devices modelled on the way groups of neurons function in the brain, and so capable of something like learning. Conditioned by exposure to Warman's collection of old punk records, the computers have been installed in six-foot-six dancing robots, comprising sturdy bases on which oddly shaped cushions, strapped with punk accessories, pneumatically piston up and down.

So in placing these creations in the audience at a series of ICA gigs (featuring the artist's own specially formed band and others) is Warman conducting a genuine experiment – how enthusiastically will the robots pogo, conditioned to hone in on the resemblance of classic punk? – or perhaps putting on a show of clever robotics-based art? On the night it doesn't really work as either; Warman doesn't help himself by only booking punk acts, but the robots pogo more or less uniformly whenever there's a band on stage. Neither the robotics nor the computational side of the project inspire awe.

If Warman's main intention is in fact to provoke some thought about aesthetics and the workings of musical appreciation, though, this doesn't necessarily count as a failure. One of his collaborators, Andrew Tweedie, asks if the robots' reactions to the music constitute what we'd call enjoyment – and if so, free from 'social values' or 'cultural baggage' as they are, whether there's a uniquely objective judgement being made here. Well, if anyone doubts that there's more to it than what the robots do – basically to analyse the formal outline of sound and couple it to physical mimicry – then the predictability of their dumb bouncing, compared to the indifferent reaction of the humans in the audience, should point them in the right direction.

For some younger fans of the original punk era, Warman's middle-aged band was an exercise in sorry nostalgia, self-indulgent even to the point of offensiveness. If the point needs to be made that the sources that taste draws on (as well as the means of expressing it) are numerous and complex, then that seems to do it. When the differences between Warman's lot and The Adverts seem as important as the similarities, the fact that the robots can't tell the difference doesn't suggest that they have objective judgement – rather that judgement is a faculty they just don't have.

Obviously it's conceivable that Warman, who half-jokes about creating robot versions of his teenage self, anticipated this kind of reaction to his work. But it's also conceivable that the Fiddian of '77 (though this could be wrong) would be somewhat unimpressed by the tame antics of his future self.

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Robin