FCJ-206 From Braitenberg’s Vehicles to Jansen’s Beach Animals: Towards an Ecological Approach to the Design of Non-Organic Intelligence

• Main Author: Maaike Bleeker
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Humanities Press 2016-12-01
• Series: Fibreculture Journal
• Subjects: non-organic intelligence; artificial intelligence; robotics; creative robotics; non-organic agents; ecological design; environmental intelligence
• Online Access: http://twentyeight.fibreculturejournal.org/2017/01/22/fcj-206-from-braitenbergs-vehicles-to-jansens-beach-animals-towards-an-ecological-approach-to-the-design-of-non-organic-intelligence/

This article presents a comparison of two proposals for how to conceive of the evolution of non-organic intelligence. One is Valentino Braitenberg’s 1984 essay ‘Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology’. The other is the Strandbeesten (beach animals) of Dutch engineer-artist Theo Jansen. Jansen’s beach animals are not robots. Yet, as semi-autonomous non-organic agents created by humans, they are interesting in the context of the development of robots for how they present an ecological approach to the design of non-organic intelligence. Placing Braitenberg’s and Jansen’s approaches side by side illuminates how Jansen’s approach implies a radically different take than Braitenberg’s on non-organic intelligence, on intelligence as environmental, and on what the relationship between agency and behaviour might comprise.