Talk (2016)

Mixed media installation and performance. Interactive sculptures.
13 min dialogue written in collaboration with Per Johansson.

Two robots with uncanny humanoid faces and strange skeletal bodies sit in a room, discussing a disturbing dream. As a visitor enters the room, the robots respond by moving their eyes, then turning their heads and speaking, as if an intruder has interrupted their conversation. We get the distinct impression that we are unwelcome, as the robots request that we “please be quiet” and turn back to their private conversation. A commissioned work for the exhibition The Imitation Game at Manchester Art Gallery.
Kjellmark was invited to make a commissioned work for the international exhibition Imitation Game at Manchester Art Gallery. In connection with this, she got invited to take part in The Human Brain Project; a comprehensive interdisciplinary research program founded in 2013 and coordinated by Henry Markram (École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). The main financier is the EU and the goal is to create a Neuromorphic Computing Platform in ten years; an "electronic brain" that works according to the same principles as the human brain. By feeding this new Neuromorphic brain with all the science we have about the human brain today, the vision is to understand the human brain better and to solve many human problems. Kjellmark was invited as a speaker at the BrainScaleS conference in March 2014. The idea for the work Talk (2016) sprung from the meeting with these researchers and the visions of their research project.