...Because the robot was on the other side!

http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol35/vol35n14/articles/Bohlen.html


Böhlen's "Advanced Perception" is a project that looks at the unquestioned
bias toward the eye and the integrative act of multi-modal perception.
The piece involved the "performance" of three chickens cohabiting with a
robot. The robot, programmed by Böhlen with advanced visual recognition,
movement-planning skills and knowledge of chicken biology, was able to make
itself "chicken friendly" and cohabitate in a kind and friendly manner with
the animals, who were unperturbed by its presence.

"Humans are expected to be able to share the world with intelligent
machines. So it made sense to me to test this idea with creatures that are
neurologically less complex," Böhlen said.

"I picked chickens for this 'kind' experiment because of their sad history
as 'experts' in living under miserable automation systems used by the
industrial food industry," he said.

Böhlen experimented for months with the project, refining the robot's
behaviors so that it became less and less frightening to the chickens-it
respected their eating area, it notified them with sound as to when it would
move, it never hit a chicken when moving forward. The birds finally let it
approach within an inch of them before getting out of its way.

"The chickens adapted to the robot once they got the point," Böhlen says. He
left it to the audience as to what "advanced perception" refers-the
machine's ability to "see" and behave in consideration of the chickens'
psyche, the visual abilities of the chickens and their ability to adapt to
an invasive "being," or to the idea of an advanced-alternate mode of
perception necessary to contemplate solutions for a future in which
technologies could intertwine kindly with natural processes.

"I learned so much about these animals," Böhlen says. "They sing beautiful
songs in the early evening. They can kill a weak member of the breed at the
spur of the moment. They can distinguish red from green. This I know because
the robot had a set of colored LED lights that flickered as it approached
the animals."

The piece was comprised of three parts: a performance of robot-chicken
cohabitation with an application of "kind" surveillance, a set of
experiments pondering the intricacies of the human visual system and a
tasting of omelets prepared by a chef using eggs produced by the chickens
during the experiment.