The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet

The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet

The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet

Ken Goldberg (Ed.)The MIT Press2000366 pp.ISBN 0-262-07203-3£21.95 (hard cover)

Keywords Robots, Telerobotics

The Robot in the Garden consists of 17 chapters which discuss various aspects of telepistemology – the study of knowledge acquired at a distance. The contributing authors come from a range of disciplines, namely philosophy, art, history and engineering.

The book starts with an Introduction to the unique phenomenon of a distance, and is followed by Eden by wire: Webcameras and the telepresent landscape. The remainder of the book is divided into four sections: philosophy; art, history and critical theory; engineering, interface and system design; and postscript.

Part I: Philosophy (chapters 3 to 7), contains essays discussing Telepistemology: Descartes's last stand; Vicariousness and authenticity; Information, nearness and farness; Acting at a distance and knowing from afar: agency and knowledge on the Internet; and Telerobotic knowledge: a reliable approach.

Chapters 8 to 13 combine to form the second part of the book. These six chapters address: The speed of light and the virtualization of reality; to lie and to act: Potemkin's villages, cinema and telepresence; dialogical telepresence and Net ecology; Presence, absence, and knowledge in telerobotic art; Exposure time, the aura and telerobotics; and The history of telepresence: automata, illusion and the rejection of the body.

Part III: Engineering, Interface and System Design, consists of four chapters. Chapters 14 and 15 address Feeling is believing: a history of telerobotics, and Tele-embodiment and shattered presence: reconstructing the body for online interaction, respectively. Being real: questions of tele-identity is discussed in chapter 16, while chapter 17 addresses Telepistemology, mediation and the design of transparent interfaces. Part IV: Postscript, contains the final chapter of the book, The film and the new psychology (1945).

The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet integrates philosophy, art and science. It contains no mathematics whatsoever, is suitable for all and is probably best categorised as verging on popular science. One bad point for this unique book is the abundance of wwws in the Web addresses. If a site will not load then try it without the leading three ws. e.g. http://robocam.va.com.au/