Picture: Stefan Iglhaut
The “Robot Garden” was devised as an invited contribution to a pavilion at the international Garden-Expo Pacific Flora in Hamamatsu. Envisaged as a new kind of techno-garden, this artificial macrocosm was home to autonomously operating robot-sculptures, which offered insights into the hidden microcosms of the animal and plant worlds through their translucent surfaces. The technical basis for this was an installation with mobile autonomous robots developed in conjunction with the Centre for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics. For Pacific Flora, the installation – which was originally shown at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover – was transformed into a virtual garden of atmospheres, designed using colours, sounds and light.
At the same time, the installation was a successful technical experiment: the mobile sculptures did not find their way using a central controlling system, but only via their own localised sensory apparatus. As a result, collisions were avoided with both their fellow robots and the visitors to the pavilion. The egg-shaped robots moved about like living creatures in an ambience resembling a virtual space, which had been created using projected images. This German-Japanese production was the first of several projects by IGLHAUT + PARTNER in Japan.