Kelly Dobson on Machine Therapy
Special Media Arts and Sciences Talk—Kelly Dobson: "Machine Therapy: Unconscious Machines and the Philosophy and Practice of Care"
Monday, April 27, 2009 | 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Location: 
Wiesner Room
Speaker: 
Kelly Dobson
Many important elements of our relationships with machines either go unnoticed or get very little attention compared to our prescribed and conscious interactions with them. These less considered elements--such as sound, infrasound, heat, and motion--are greatly significant and active on multiple levels. Dobson investigates the roles these elements play in the social, cultural, political, psychological, and physiological aspects of our interactions with machines. This informs my design and building of machines that respond in ways analogous to human subconscious, autonomic, and visceral behaviors. As we begin to really take advantage of the fact that our nervous systems intimately resonate with the properties and behaviors of our machines, new technical, artistic, and design territory is revealed. A particularly compelling facet of this work will be in developing new paradigms for machines that facilitate care. Dobson will share work on machines that participate in the mobility of embodiment--the fluidity of what is experienced as part of one's self or separate. Grounded by work revealing the dynamic interplay of physical action, object relations, neurobiology, emotional experience, immune functions, and mental processes, future projects and systems will be discussed with emphasis on transformative and empowering engagements between humans and machines. As we design machines to support and possibly enact care, what parameters of experience might we foreground and privilege, and to what results? This research question concerns not only individual health experiences but also personal and cultural understandings of care and agency of self and responsibility to others and our environment. This work is both artistic practice and engineering research that explores our ethical, existential, and technological lives.
Biography: 
Kelly Dobson is an artist and researcher whose work establishes a new area exploring unconscious and unexamined elements of relationships between people and machines. She is the inventor of machines--such as ScreamBody and Blendie--that exist at the interface of art, social theory, engineering, and psychology and that invite empowering and transformative expression through critical creative engagement. Informed by building and studying machines that foreground the affective and physiological aspects of their relationships with people, Dobson is intensely focused on revealing and addressing crucial but often dissimulated elements of being and care. Her work has been widely published in books and journals and has been exhibited in venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, Eyebeam, and The Kitchen (all in New York City), and Future Film Festival in Bologna, ISEA in Helsinki, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Mediamatic in Amsterdam, Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and the Millennium Museum in Beijing. Dobson has won many awards, residencies, and fellowships for her work, including invited residencies at STEIM, the Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund, VIDA Art and Artificial Life, the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship, and many others. She earned both a PhD and MS in media arts and sciences from MIT, an MS in visual studies from the MIT Visual Arts Program, and a BFA from Cornell University's School of Architecture, Art & Planning. Currently as artist-in-resident at Rhode Island School of Design, Dobson has introduced new courses in the Digital+Media and Textile departments exploring new materials and material processes, advanced Jacquard computer controlled sensor design, and new media technology in the perception and production of space. She has been artist-in-residence and visiting assistant professor at Cornell University, and has led numerous courses and workshops at MIT, the Design Institute at University of Minnesota, Metapolis in Barcelona, and Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Dobson's work transcends disciplinary boundaries and is published and referenced across many fields as she continues to engage in a combination of art, design, medical, and cultural research at the interface of technology, being, and care.