Infrasense, a first-time collaboration between artists KIT and Robert Saucier, is a touring exhibition that is showing in eleven galleries across Canada, U.S.A., U.K. and Belgium. Walking into the gallery space at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, Infrasense is akin to stepping inside a video game, a digital simulation of a horse race. Nine horses, designed by the artists as an amalgamation of hundreds of 3-D and 2-D representations of the mythical Trojan horse throughout history, move in a slow, linear fashion across the gallery. They do so in such a way that the non-linear fashion and fractured sounds the horses emit become an instantly juxtaposing and jarring dynamic for the audience. These mechanical horses are sensor-based robots that react either to the wall that has been constructed around them or to the other robotic components of the installation. Each horse has a backpack made from the plastic of dead computers. In each pack are speakers emit the murmuring sounds of the local population’s voices, a different voice coming from each box, all being amplified, albeit quietly.
Accompanying the horses are three robotic ‘bugs,’ which appear insect-like in their shape and through their busy vexing motions around the horses. The name bug, such as that of the Trojan Horse, is an obvious reference to a viral entity of the Internet variety. The viewers are encouraged to pick up a remote control and control one of the bugs. When a bug comes near a horse, the horse stops briefly, allowing the volume of its voice to rise so that the viewer can hear segments of its story. What these mechanical horses are uttering are different stories about viruses; personal accounts of bodily or computer-based viral experiences. Airing these viral stories leads KIT and Saucier to look at our current information age and the way paranoia and fear fuel the rapidity of those narrative flows. One of the bugs in the Infrasense installation can also be controlled via the internet by logging onto the project’s website (www.infrasense.net). With the camera that has been installed in the gallery space, users of Infrasense have the opportunity to type in commands, which will make the bug move right, left or forward in the actual space. As a result, users in different cities and countries can direct one of the bugs and move it to locations, which will then trigger the horses to speak, subsequently affecting the audience in the gallery. This component of the installation raises questions of what telerobots bring to contemporary culture and questions about the sense of responsibility users of this technology assume, or in fact, do not assume...(extrait)

ETC