Final Assignment: Bewilderment Robot
Rich Powers: A Bewildered Mushroom
How great is it to be constantly bewildered and lost in the world?
To constantly marvel at the beauty around us.
To live in a world where around every corner, there is something new.
To fear.
To love.
To be excited by.
To discover everything that lies ahead...both good...and bad.
And simply, be bewildered.
In its early use, bewilderment referred to getting lost in the woods. The word specifically meant to lose your way in the wild. To be bewildered means to lose yourself completely and then find yourself again. It means to get lost in a path where there are many many further paths in front of you and then choosing which path to choose, not for economic, or colonial reasons but more discovering the world and the wild and marveling at whatever is in the wild. To be bewildered means that wherever you go, there is a path ahead of you and another path and another path, and we constantly unravel what is ahead of us and what more there is to discover.
State 1: Dormancy
The creature remains dormant when it is not in one of its states or scanning its surroundings. In its dormant instance, the creature displays a breathing movement. Slowly lighting up and Lighting down as it sleeps in its ever changing surroundings.
State 1: Dormancy
This is the brightest that the creature gets in its dormancy.
State 2: Scanning
The scanning state is where the creature wakes up and looks at its surroundings. In this state, the creature decides what choice it will make next. It tries to figure out exactly where it is at and how to function in its surroundings. Will it be either excited or will it be scared?
State 3: Excited!
In the excited state, the creature lights up each of its different limbs in random movements as it is overexcited at what it sees. It almost cannot retain its happiness.
State 4: Panicking
State 4 is made up of 2 states. The first is the panicking state. This panicking state is the state where the creature looks out at its surroundings and it does not like what it sees, and as so it begins to go into a frantic state lighting up quickly before going into hiding.
State 4: Fear
In this state, the creature is hiding. Every so often the creature peeks out, as if it is looking from inside the closet as it hides.
Decision Making: The creature chooses one of its decisions before it goes back to dormancy and then this cycle continues in perpetuity. State 1 going to State 2 and then the creature chooses between Fear of Excited as its state and then it goes back to Dormancy before it makes this cycle again.
Some Motivations and Inspirations
The first motivation came to explore humanity in its purest sense and what does it entail. I began to think about various scenes of movies and television shows, these being Love, Death and Robots, and Back 2 the Future. I found that in many movies, humanity is not explored in a simple form, rather humanity is complex and can take many different paths and a constant of many characters in these movies and in these shows are bewildered by certain situations. Many of these situations also explore interesting sci-fi concepts and combine art and science.
The first inspiration I had while researching this came from Kevin Berger, in an article written in Nautilus in 2018. The name of the article is "We Are All Bewildered Machines". In this article, Berger met with two figures, John Donoghue and Richard Powers. Donoghue is a roboticist who created a robot that allowed a woman to take a drink of coffee with her mind as she had lost the use of her limbs (Berger, 2018).
While Richard Powers is a well-known novelist who writes about science and technology and the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. What this article displayed was as Berger saw humanity in science when he saw the robot that helped this woman. While when speaking to Richard Powers, Powers speaks about Lewis Thomas' essay On Matters of Doubt, where he wrote that most things in the world are to be bewildered at (2018). He also suggested the idea of bewilderment being the middle of science and art (2018).
This made me feel that I wanted to make a creature that resembled this feeling. A feeling of simply being, in the wild and in simply waking up and going through different states of bewilderment in its life, as that is also the essence of humanity is it not, to discover and to be bewildered by what we discover.
From this came the name "Rich Powers" for the creature.
Another inspiration came from an essay written by Columbia University professor, Jack Halberstam called "Bewilderment". In it, he speaks that what it means to be bewildered is to be lost, and he states that to be bewildered shares many different meanings among them being magical, scary, and delightful (Halberstam, n.d.). This allowed me to dive deeper into how I wanted to create my creature and how it would navigate those paths in front of it. It allowed me to realize that bewilderment is not a simple thing, rather it is one state that can be summed up by numerous emotions and feelings.
References
Berger, K. (2018, November 15). We Are All Bewildered Machines - Issue 66: Clockwork . Nautilus. https://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/we-are-all-bewildered-machines.
Halberstam, J. (n.d.). Bewilderment. Harvard Design Magazine. http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/45/bewilderment.