Books

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Film/Video

by Ken Goldberg.
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England. 2000.
$ 40.00
ISBN 0-262-04176-6.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker, U.S.A. E-mail: eugenethacker@HOTMAIL.COM

For a comparative review of The Robot in the Garden, click here for a review by Yvonne Spielmann.


One of the common dissatisfactions with interactivity on the Web is that telepresence is not, well, presence. Certainly some of the more>interesting new media projects have deconstructed our assumptions concerning presence and the sense of "really" being there. But, when it comes down to it, we are faced with the experience that you and I in our separate computer-hovels chatting over CU-SeeMe, is not the same as you and I having drinks in a cozy bar. This difference has prompted talk of a qualitative difference between two essentially different modes of communication and interaction, each contingent upon a variety of factors (technology, class, cultural difference, race, geography, language, etc.). The "noise" that often comes through is not just technical, but can also be social.

Part of the problem of computer-mediated communication has to do with the status of the body in the interaction--or rather, the state of "embodiment." We all want our communication and interactions to be as transparent as possible, and there is a sense in which physical presence plays an important part in giving us that feeling of authenticity, of transparency. But how do we address the importance of embodiment when dealing with technologies such as the Web?

This is one of the main questions in Ken Goldberg's new anthology, "The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet" (MIT Press, 2000) Using the term "telepistemology" to talk about how knowledge is transmitted, produced, and circulated on the net, Goldberg has assembled a collection of different perspectives on tele- robotics, as both a technological and a cultural issue. Roughly divided into three sections (the philosophy of telepistemology, tele-robotic art, and the engineering of tele-robotics), "The Robot in the Garden" covers a wide range of material, from Thomas Campanella's essay on webcams, to Martin Jay's essay on time-delay and light-speed, to art- based "dialogical telepresence" (Eduardo Kac's term), to the engineering of tele-robotics interfaces in the essay by Michael Idinopulos. Each piece brings up, from its own perspective, the issue of how the intersection of communication and control can produce forms of knowledge, agency, authenticity, and meaningful interaction.

While the various essays are interesting on their own, "The Robot in the Garden" is strongest when essays are linked together. For instance, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus' accounts of phenomenological approaches to cognition (opposed to Descartes' classical divide between mind and body) forms a strong foundation for John Canny and Eric Paulos' essay on the design of unique, "tele-embodied" systems for human-to-human tele- robotic interaction. Similarly, artist and critic Marina Grzinic's elaboration of net-based time-delay and Benjamin's notion of "aura" forms an interesting dialogue to Albert Borgmann's sharp distinctions between "promixal" or real space and "mediated" space.

Blake Hannaford's history of telerobotics is perhaps the most fascinating piece in the collection. It supplements the book's philosophical reflections with hard, technical details. Hannaford's discussion of tele-robotics research in terms of energetics transfer, time-delay, degree of control, and system stability takes on interesting resonances when considered in political terms. Lev Manovich's essay is similar, especially when he discusses telepresence not as image- deception but as "acting over distance. In real time." For Manovich, telepresence is actually about the negation of presence, or better, the banalization of presence: "the essence of telepresence is that it is antipresence. I don't have to be physically present in a location to affect reality at this location."

Although "The Robot in the Garden" does not contain texts on specific real-world uses of tele-robotic technology (for instance, the Mars Sojourner, hazardous waste sites, deep-sea excavation, or tele-robotic surgery; most of the examples come from art), it does provide important epistemological questions for understanding this latest addition to Web technology, showing how the cultural and the technological are both implicated in the ambiguities surrounding computer-mediated communication.