Join us in the STUDIO at 5:30 PM on Thursday March 13th for a visiting lecture from Ken Goldberg.

Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word “robot” was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human
overlords. A century later, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics, fueled by venture capital and governments, are disrupting labor, trade, and political stability. Claims about “superintelligence” and existential threats to humanity raise new questions about the essential distinctions between humans and machines.

To contextualize a series of his artworks that explore this boundary, Ken Goldberg references Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny (1919) and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970). Ken will share robot paintings from his first art exhibit at CMU and art installations such as the Telegarden (1995-2004), a living garden tended by a robot operated by over 100,000 visitors over the Internet, and AlphaGarden (2020-), a fully automated garden that took an unexpected twist during the pandemic.

Ken will also present two new projects: Ancient Wisdom (2024), a collection of wooden sculptures addressing AI and ecology in the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Los Angeles, and Breathless (2023), an 8-hour robot-human dance performance that premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY.

Bio:

Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley who explores the boundaries between the digital and the
natural. His artworks include a live garden tended by a robot controlled by over 100,000 people via the internet, a 1/1 millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and award-winning short documentary films about robots and Jewish identity. Goldberg’s projects have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center (Paris), Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), ICC Biennale (Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen (New York). He is Founding Director of Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium and has held visiting positions at San Francisco Art Institute, MIT Media Lab, and Pasadena Art Center. Goldberg was awarded the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995, and was named IEEE Fellow in 2005. His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. Goldberg is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.