The Mercury Project

Ken Goldberg

The Mercury Project ,
Co-workers & Funding
Co-directors: Ken Goldberg and Michael Mascha
Project team: Steven Gentner, Nick Rothenberg,
Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley
Documents
  • The Mercury Project,
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  • mercury
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  • The Mercury Project
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Description
Mercury Project combined robotics and archaeology in an interactive art installation. To our knowledge, the Mercury Project was the first system that allowed WWW users to remotely view and alter the real world via tele-robotics. Users excavated artifacts buried in a sand-filled terrarium in our laboratory in Los Angeles. All buried artifacts were derived from an unnamed 19th Century text which provided a meta-commentary on science and the Internet. Users were challenged to collectively identify this text by describing their findings and hypotheses in an ongoing Operator's Log.
Keywords
  • aesthetics
    • multi-user
  • genres
    • installations
      • interactive installations
    • robotic art
  • subjects
    • Art and Science
      • archaeology
    • History and Memory
      • historical sites
Technology & Material
Exhibitions & Events
Bibliography