The Making of Autonomous XII
“Autonomous 12” James Georgopoulos, 2016
"Autonomous X12" (2016)
Medium & Description:
A sculptural representation of a driverless car’s chassis, constructed from aerospace materials, cameras, and interactive screens. The screens display the AI’s "vision," showing how it gathers data to understand its surroundings.
This work highlights the marvel and danger of automation. It reflects on the role of AI in decision-making, particularly in life-or-death scenarios, such as those faced by autonomous vehicles.
The intricate data collection illustrated in this work parallels modern concerns about surveillance and privacy in AI technologies.Autonomous 12 is a video sculpture based on a self driving car.
At the time I started to create the sculpture piece in 2014 the self driving industry was in its infancy stage.
I sourced an unused chassis (in white) exclusively built by robots for the Nissan Motorsports race team. The chassis was delivered to my Hawthorne studio on the Jack Northrop Field Municipal Airport located next to Tesla design studio and Space X.
All the exterior panels were then removed to expose the skeleton frame work of the Nissan Race car
During the fabrication process of the video sculpture I was working on the pre-production of the film shoot in Los Angeles, the idea was to produce a homage of moving pictures that referenced Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Sunset Boulevard between 1965 and 2001. Finished projects that were an inspiration include his fourth photographic art book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966.
The Film was shot on Go Pro 4 in collaboration with my brother Dean Georgopoulos, a ICG LOCAL 600 DIT in the film industry. I drove a car down the entire length of Sunset Blvd with the cameras were mounted on the exterior using the measurements of the sculpture. Through Dean’s connections with Adobe, we were able to utilize early tracking software in after-effects to create a simulation of an autonomous vehicle’s tracking capabilities. The idea was to bring the viewer inside what was then an imagined cockpit view of an autonomous vehicle’s learning process.
The Fabrication process was engineering a base for the chassis structure and the 360 degree Lidar unit on the roof, as well as the various radars and cameras and other elements.
The entire chassis was sand blasted and was the powder coated in a Porsche GT silver finish
The electrical cables were fabricated from found from old vintage 24 track Hollywood sound studios
The cameras on the AI car were once used to monitor a aero space company building
The film was displayed on a flat screen mounted in the cabin in the middle and at the time people would say that’s too big or that’s only in the middle, and as we now know the design in Tesla and other driverless cars are basically in the middle,
The finished video sculpture is connected to other pieces in show form or if the piece is a stand alone in a collection the sculpture is connected to the wall via CAT5 cables.
