Ulrike GABRIEL develops interactive works that use breathing, the movements of the eye and other aspects of the human body as a direct interface. Her <<Terrain>> series of recent years uses brain waves to control numerous robots.

At first glance, the movements of Ulrike GABRIEL's robots seem extremely complex, yet in actuality their patterns of movement are determined by the simple external stimuli of light contrasts. Indeed, these robots would seem to approximate our prototypical image of the robot.

With the rapid advances in various technologies today, the word "robot" has already begun to stir up certain feelings of nostalgia in us. What was named by Karel CAPEK almost a hundred years ago symbolized an existence at the opposite pole of the human being--in other words, a lifeless machine. Because its appearance approximated the human figure when it first appeared, the robot was in fact able to make us constantly aware of this essential difference.

Yet in recent images of "artificial life" and "artificial intelligence" made possible by contemporary technology, we have little sense of being jarred by the mechanical. Or rather, we should say that the substantive image of something that, like the robot, resembles the human being is persistently hidden therein. Perhaps this is a measure taken to permanently avoid creating the kind of naive "misunderstandings" seen in the world of science fiction--that "robots become human" or "human beings turn into robots."

GABRIEL's work with robots offers us <<Terrain>> for questioning the naivetof these naive misunderstandings of ours. The changes of light that generate the robots' complex movements are themselves generated by the brainwaves of those who participate in the work (the audience). However, such changes are not a reflection of the audience's thoughts or will; rather, they are proportionate to the volume of alpha waves, brain waves that occur in a state of extreme relaxation and cessation of thought.

Thus in GABRIEL's work, thought, the most human of activities, becomes that which will alienate us from the robots' motion. The will to control the robots actually stops their motion or throws them into a panic. So the participants in this work can only endow the robots with movement/life by not thinking, which is to say, by becoming robots themselves.

In a way, the reversal of the controlling and the controlled becomes visible through the contrast between the sight of people (the audience) sitting down and closing their eyes in meditation and the complex movements of the robots that result from this. But it is here that GABRIEL's work truly questions the naivetof seeing a tragic relationship between CAPEK's theatrical robots and human beings. In other words, she attempts to create the terrain for questioning the dualistic relationality (disjunction) of modern technology and human beings, the controlling and the controlled, which gives rise to such naivet and for discovering new relations.