Fernando Orellana

Fernando's talk and interview were super interesting to me, especially his discussion on the way people react to his robotic installations. The often-intense reactions his piece Elevator's Music would get from people, either via their extreme discomfort with robots or their comically compassionate response to them, which climaxed when one robot got stuck in the ceiling and wasn't able to retract into its hideaway. This prompted some viewers to alert the museum authorities in an effort to assist the robot in its time of need. 

As a science fiction nerd and someone who is fairly obsessed with Otherness and the role of compassion in creating a livable society, the topic is fascinating. My current project is about identity and how technology influences or mutates our selves. It's a part of a larger body of work which threads a series of stories together, each offering different examinations of interrelated social issues and one of the central goals is too look at the role of various factors on how we see the Other, how we assign or deny human rights, how we define the self, and so on. 

Currently a good bit of discussion is happening in the technological world about what to do with new forms of consciousness when they arrive. With advances in Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality systems, cloning technologies, and embryonic genetic modification among others, we're at a point in our development as a species that these questions have become genuinely important as opposed to fun theoretical exercises.

The diverse responses to these robots, whether in their moment of struggle or simply as they did what they were made to do gives a tiny glimpse into how we might approach a world in which aliens, robots, clones and/or synthetic lifeforms live amongst us, the current masters of consciousness.