Double-Taker (Snout) Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White, 2008Double-Taker (Snout) is an interactive installation conceived of by Glan Levin and collaborators and situated above a museum entrance of Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The mechanical arm, designed to resemble an elephant's trunk with a cartoon eye at the end of it, responds to the presence and movements of humans within its vicinity. The autonomous interaction of the object plays with notions of the salience of machines and their increasingly accurate replication of human, or at least animal, action. Withing cities, and around public and private buildings humans are generally being observed on surveillance equipment of some sort, but the direct responses of this creation make present the act of being observed. Not only does it alter our awareness of being constantly watched, even while we believe we are anonymous pedestrians, but the responsive actions of Double-Taker are so lifelike that they alter how we percieve the machine itself - as a concious, receptive animal.
The example video on the site features a group of children interacting with Double-Taker, which allows the machine to become a playful element is an otherwise lifeless environment (the outside of a building). However, the main element of the project that stood out to me was it's ability to make humans aware of their presence in otherwise empty environments through the addition of an animated machine. It is not just that the machine knows that humans are in its presence, but it responds to each one in a unique manner, reminding us all of our own individual impacts on the environments we inhabit. Many of Golan Levin's other projects, specifically Opto-Isolator, also play with a similar theme - what happens when the art we observe begins to observe us? The addition of New Media techniques allows Levin and other artists to make this concept a physical reality.
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