Simon P Jones

Mobile GPGPU Acceleration of Embodied Robot Simulation

It is desirable for a robot to be able to run on-board simulations of itself in a model of the world to evaluate action consequences and test new controller solutions, but simulation is computationally expensive. Modern mobile System-on-Chip devices have high performance at low power consumption levels and now incorporate powerful graphics processing units, making them good potential candidates to host on-board simulations. We use the parallel language OpenCL on two such devices to accelerate the widely-used Stage robot simulator and demonstrate both higher simulation speed and lower energy use on a multi-robot benchmark. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that GPGPU on mobile devices have been used to accelerate robot simulation, and moves towards providing an autonomous robot with an embodied what-if capability.

Evolving behaviour trees for swarm robotics

Controllers for swarms of robots are hard to design as swarm behaviour emerges from their interaction, and so controllers are often evolved. However, these evolved controllers are often difficult to understand, limiting our ability to predict swarm behaviour. We suggest behaviour trees are a good control architecture for swarm robotics, as they are comprehensible and promote modular reuse. We design a foraging task for kilobots and evolve a behaviour tree capable of performing that task, both in simulation and reality, and show the controller is compact and understandable.

Beckett and Warhol, Under the Eye of God

This writing makes a small start towards a mighty task: to draw out the resonances between the work of the two artists who have probably had the most influence on today’s experimental performance – Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol – through exploring their first encounters with the medium of film and the technology of the camera in the mid-1960s. Many of the key aesthetic questions that concern contemporary performance-makers were brought into sharp focus by their differing practices nearly fifty years ago. In Kuhnian terms they realized two contrasting paradigms that further distilled the aesthetic challenge first made by the avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth century. Those following have worked within their paradigms, whether they have acknowledged that or not, fulfilling the function of followers – exploring the anomalies. Beckett remorselessly and relentlessly pulled focus from the object of study to the plane of the lens itself: a Modernist struggling with the obfuscation of the medium – whatever medium – and the resultant confusion of communication, striving to produce with each newly inevitable failure a less corrupted description of being in the world. Whereas Warhol, coming to epitomize the post-modern, drew from that selfsame avantgarde its delight in technology’s ability to capture bytes of reality and recklessly assemble them in the montage. One left his native country and his academic career to work in the centre of the European avant-garde – Paris; the other was the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants who embraced the entrepreneurial energy and commercial know-how of the new world at its very heart – New York. And yet, despite these obvious differences, both underwent artistic adventures that were to map the territories of performance for the next forty years and would end up confronting the same fundamental border – that of the human and the superhuman: the problem of the inhuman outside, what I am calling the divine. This is not to suggest that either believed in the existence of God. Indeed Beckett specifically rejected any such entity. And yet, despite the default brutal or parodic tone of all references to Him, the fact that He seems to haunt almost every work suggests that Beckett, at the very least, recognized the power of such a myth. The complexity of Beckett’s engagement with theological issues throughout his work has been explored by others: see, for example, Mary Bryden’s careful and thorough explication of Beckett’s use of biblical texts – ‘This cursing of God is rarely countervailed in Beckett’s writing by a blessing of God. Yet, as the Book of Job demonstrates, cursing provides a kind of continuity of engagement. It represents sparks and interferences in the current, but not cessation’ (1998: 131) – or Laura Borge’s study of each character’s search for the divine, or Hélène Baldwin’s or Jacobsen and Mueller’s studies connecting various theological positions to broader philosophical debates in existentialism and phenomenology. However, this essay will suggest that Beckett’s encounter with film

Unsettling Materialities: The Indexical Relationship of Photography and Theatre in Bodies in Flight’s Model Love

Abstract This co-authored article considers Model Love (2008 –2011), an intermedial collaboration between an experimental theatre company and a photographic artist. Positioning itself as a conversation arising from an ongoing joint practice, the fragmented dialogic approach engaged in the writing reflects and refracts key salient attributes, as they were elaborated through a variety of performance contexts. In Model Love, the photograph became an adpositional object of performance: variously as foundation for performance, material of performance, documents from performance, and objects alongside performance. However, the several manifestations articulated through the collaboration revealed a central relation at work that was never wholly resolved: between to perform and the photograph. The article seeks to examine a number of discrete, albeit inter-relating, respective positions, between theatre and photography, arising from an appreciation of this unsettled – unsettling – relation. In so doing, what at first appear as countervailing positions emerge as closer affiliations, ultimately testament to the power of appearance. The photographic illustrations and italici zed captions are drawn from one particular performance context of Model Love, a durational installation at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, in May 2008.

A Two Teraflop Swarm

We introduce the Xpuck swarm, a research platform with an aggregate raw processing power in excess of two teraflops. The swarm uses 16 e-puck robots augmented with custom hardware that uses the substantial CPU and GPU processing power available from modern mobile system-on-chip devices. The augmented robots, called Xpucks, have at least an order of magnitude greater performance than previous swarm robotics platforms. The platform enables new experiments that require high individual robot computation and multiple robots. Uses include online evolution or learning of swarm controllers, simulation for answering what-if questions about possible actions, distributed super-computing for mobile platforms, and real-world applications of swarm robotics that requires image processing, or SLAM. The teraflop swarm could also be used to explore swarming in nature by providing platforms with similar computational power as simple insects. We demonstrate the computational capability of the swarm by implementing a fast physics-based robot simulator and using this within a distributed island model evolutionary system, all hosted on the Xpucks.

Commuting Performance → Working the Middle Ground

In everyday English, ‘commute’ has two meanings: to journey regularly between home and work, and to reduce a prison sentence. The meanings are apparently distinct, not least since one privileges space and the other time. Journeys also take time, however, and sentences are served within spatial constraints, and in this chapter, we will explore these conflations of meaning and experience in order to explain some of the conceptual and practical challenges of making a touring performance about urban routines.

Not Citizens, But Persons: the ethics in action of performance's intimate work

In responding to 9/11 through a critique of Austin’s speech-act theory, Mark Franko writes: Now the event that ‘happens to us’ ‘mocks’ [… our] understandings of the speech act. The event, in other terms, is neither conventional, logocentric, nor iterative. The singular presence of ‘what takes place’ takes the place of the performative, and mocks it, displaces it, and supersedes it. In other terms, the event disarms the performative by effectively removing its capacity to respond. The event leaves the act ‘speechless’. (Lepecki, 2004, p. 116)

De-Second-Naturing: Word Unbecoming Flesh in the Work of Bodies in Flight

Since 1997, through a series of intermedial collaborations with musi cians, video and sonic artists, Bodies in Flight have progressively inter rogated the impact of digital technologies on our sense of our selves and our interrelationships with others, and how those technologies can be used in performance to expose this intimate process of incorpo ration into the human psyche - what Bodies in Flight call ‘second- naturing’. This series of works has produced a sustained contemplation on contemporary human experience as an interstices in-between various discursive fields and their related technologies.

Working on the Middle Ground: A Case Study of Institutional Inter-Action about Practice as Research

Along with much writing alongside (my preposition of choice) practice as research [PaR], I have tended to the extremes: either the dizzying heights of theorizing,1 or the nitty-gritty self-reflexive explicating of particular practices, especially my own with Bodies in Flight.2 This verticality of writing, as it were from the two ends of the scale — macro—micro — inevitably leaps over the middle. This is odd given the heightened significance of the necessary pragmatics of how one actually gets to the point of making a work, of becoming a practitioner-researcher. So, at the risk of being mundane, I want to write a short story, or rather — let others now involved in the same story speak it on all our behalves, about the middle ground of PaR: the horizontal plane or “ground level”3 of funding and networks, places and persons, opportunities and risks. Without theorizing too much, I want to make an account of the de-Certeaudian tactics of the non-teleological, Deleuzian rhizomatic assemblage that has come to happen between the University of Bristol’s Department of Drama: theatre, film, television, and Arnolfini: the one being the first university drama department in the UK [established 1947] up on the hill and the other being a leading contemporary visual and performing arts venue [established 1961] down by the harborside of this small West-Country city.4