Engineer as Artist - IAA (Institute for Applied Autonomy) [USA]
IAA operatives will discuss the expressive opportunities afforded by appropriating the tools, techniques, and terminologies of the military-industrial complex.
The Institute for Applied Autonomy was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of engineers, designers, artists and activists who are united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination. The group's stated mission is to develop technologies that extend the autonomy of human activists in the performance of real-world, public acts of expression. The diminishing accessibility of public spaces for free expression and the increased omni-presence of electronic surveillance has been a key motivation for IAA research. The results have included an ultra-cute robot designed for targeted distribution of subversive literature and a small tele-operated robot designed for high-speed graffiti deployment from a remote location. The project called i-See is a web-based navigation service that allows users to avoid surveillance altogether by providing them with the path of least surveillance to their destination. Current research is focused on expanding the i-See software to serve as an open-source web-based map server and data collection tool.