InterAccess is pleased to present Field Studies, a solo exhibition by the Toronto-based artist Jessica Field.

Please join us on Friday, October 8th from 7 until 10pm for the opening of Field Studies.

Jessica Field's artistic practice explores the possibilities for shared behaviour between organic and inorganic objects. For the past eleven years she has worked with robotics and Artificial Intelligence. In creating simple robotic ecosystems, Field's research, which is based in aesthetics and Primitive Behaviour Programming, questions the purpose of studying Artificial Intelligence. Is the study of AI about understanding ourselves? Is AI really about the methods of persuasion that are employed in order to convince the public that artificial life is possible?

Field creates environments which shape the behaviours and interactions of their robot constituents. In these stagings, each individual robot's simple programming leads to complex interactions within the overall environment. In Field Studies, the gallery space is transformed into a museum -- even a zoo -- housing the robots Field has designed and constructed along with supporting documentary materials. In one area the movements and behaviours of a small pack of solar powered robots, conceived as single-cell organisms, are closely monitored through a intricate system of measuring apparatus. Continuing this absurdist dialogue, the videos 'Anthropod Tales' and 'Ideological Ecosystem' offer documentary evidence of the robots' natural and social habitats, and portray their human-like flaws and idiosyncrasies. Contrasting these anthropomorphic imaginings, however, are a third video titled 'Like a Robot' and a larger pen containing the robots portrayed in 'Anthropod Tales'. These two pieces pull the viewer back and remind us of the robots' fundamental inability to comprehend, reason and adapt, all of which are attributes we have come to project onto these inherently simple machines.

Jessica Field has an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally, exhibiting at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Museum Tinguley (Basel, Switzerland), Kunsthaus Graz (Graz, Austria) and Electrohype 2008 (Sweden). Jessica Field currently teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto.