"The Creature" Barney Haynes & North Pitney 2006

The Creature is a collaboration between Barney Haynes and North Pitney with the objective of bringing their shared interests in machine learning, gesture and behavior together in a single project. The sculptural body of the project has been culled from Haynes' vast library of high tech and industrial detritus while the programming strategies are informed by Pitney's research in machine perception and intelligence. The project is vastly interdisciplinary with all parties contributing to all phases and strategies.

The Creature is an amalgamation of motors, computers, sensors, gears and wires hung on a skeleton of repurposed machine components. Sensors affixed to the Creature give it a crude perception of its surroundings and its orientation therein. All of its motion and behavior is derived from random impulses sifted into ordered strategies by its memory/action algorithms. The sensor data is transcoded into video and is mixed into memory thereby developing more complex behavior through an aggregation of the data.

The Creature thecreature.org
Barney Haynes' ultrafuzz.net
North Pitney's northpitney.com/