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edited by Ken Goldberg.
MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. 2000.
ISBN 0-262-04176-6.
Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann, Germany. E-mail: ys89@cornell.edu

For a comparative review of The Robot in the Garden, click here for a review by Eugene Thacker.


Evidently, a large number of publications in media philosophy, cognitive science and engineering explore how new technologies challenge not only the ways of communication but put into question in a fundamental way commonly agreed assumptions on the understanding of perception and knowledge. A variety of interdisciplinary approaches connect humanities' discourse and computer science to examine the effects that remotely controlled machines (telerobots) and information presented on the internet (through webcameras and more complex tools for 'telepresence') have on the human understanding of time and space, of nearness and farness, of reality, fiction and fake/deceit. Most of the recent debate newly raises conceptual considerations of 'older' disciplines and in particular sheds light on major shifts in the philosophical discourse of epistemology that are seen in the context of emerging technologies: mechanical, electric and microprocessors.

The examination of epistemological issues in the volume "The Robot in the Garden" edited by artist-engineer Ken Goldberg leads further and deals with the phenomena of telepresence and remotely controlled interaction with and through media that are seen as a determining cultural form in the age of tele-technologies. As Goldberg suggests in the introduction, tele-technologies like telephone, telegraph and television are by definition mediators and communicators of information at a distance, whereas the telerobot is a different device that allows to control and maneuver 'action' at a distance. Strikingly the global dimension of telepresence (the term was introduced by Marvin Minsky) in the internet is performed by webcameras. Goldberg (himself a pioneer in the development of robots steered on the internet) and cultural critic Thomas J. Campanella convincingly describe it is the experience of telepresence on the internet that forms a new paradigm of surveillance and immersion, in particular when webprojects use webcameras in combination with telerobotics as a technological means to achieve a high 'reality effect.'

The widely discussed project "Telegarden" (a telerobotic installation on the internet by Goldberg and others) asks users to directly plant and water seeds in a real but remote physical space. Since the real garden is only accessible on the internet, "our knowledge of the Telegarden is technologically mediated, and that introduces a disturbing doubt," concludes Machiko Kusahara in his discussion of reality effects achieved through webcameras and robots. Finally, there is no evidence to know that the "Telegarden" really exists. In view of engineering Blake Hannaford provides a different set of determinations and explains the needs to develop telerobotics and remote manipulation. Hannaford unfolds in a comprehensive way the ideas and testing of telerobotic systems that have been desgined to master action at distance and "bi-directional" communication.

In a historical view on philosophical considerations of mediation (following Descartes, Locke, and Sartre) the resulting epistemological question centrally deals with the subcategory "telepistemology", introduced by the editor Goldberg to describe the experience of a second degree "mediation" that conceptually means forgery and skeptically implies the "loss" of proof of what is real. However, a different standpoint in psychology is represented with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the reprint of his famous essay "The Film and the New Psychology" from 1945. Merlau-Ponty not only rejects the dichotomy of mind and body that underlies the Cartesian assumption, but furthermore argues that perception is immediate and results from a system of configurations. The point is that perception is not a sum of sensations but unique "as a whole and at once". This notion in phenomenology shares fundamental assumptions with 'gestalt' theory and has been further developed in cognitive perception theory that affirms the wholeness of perception in James Gibson's statement of "direct perception".

Hubert Dreyfus in his brillant essay "Telepistemology: Descarte's last stand" links the two controversial considerations on knowledge. With great lucidity Dreyfus argues that tele-technologies strongly suggest a reaffirmation of Descarte's skepticism (the more prostheses are at use the more doubts are reasonable) while at the same time the author explains in accordance with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that our basic relation to the world is direct, and not indirect, as skepticism suggests. The smart point that Dreyfus makes is to say unquestionable belief in the perceptual world gives the necessary background "that we can doubt the veracity of any specific perceptual experience" so that there is a "background disposition" to confirm reliability and this forms a central issue at stake in tele-technological 'reality'. Dreyfus' theoretical assumptions evidently coincide with contemporary cognitive psychology, even if the parallel to internal schemata is not drawn in the text.

Having a background in cognitive science Alvin Goldman proposes a "reliabilist approach" to "telerobotic knowledge and pleas for a stronger consideration of causal factors of knowledge. Starting from the assumption that rather a set of conditions/beliefs constitute knowledge, Goldmann approaches the telepistemological problem posed by the installation "Telegarden" in contextual terms in order to specify the characteristics of knowledge that these tele-epistemological settings may provide. Although the idea of "direct perception" is not at all explicitely discussed in the book, it is nevertheless conceptually addressed where the phenomenological approach, such as Goldman, shares common assumptions with ecological cognitivism. In saying that the perceptual act is guided by selection and internal schemata, an ecological approach to knowing how we perceive things in motion in three-dimensional space would depart from former cognitive psychology and computational theory and reject the notion of construction, representation and mediation. Moreover, recent research in cognitive science, especially neurophysiology and cognitve film theory seems to emphasize an ecological notion of perception that is based on human's capacity of 'direct perception'.

In the context of a larger debate the issues discussed in the theoretical contributions of the book parallel the highly disputed topic in cognitive psychology that deals with fundamental assumptions in the act of perception that would determine humans' capacities to make meaning of the physical world. Where research in cognitive psychology provides evidence for built-in schemata in the human perceptual system and computational theory asserts that the built-in structures create veridical but also non-veridical perception (the latter is true in illusion), however most authors in the book "Robot in the Garden" rather focus the realm of philosophy and the dichotomy of mediated versus immediate experience. For example, Catherine Wilson takes up the topic of veridicality under the aspect of proximity and mediation. Her argument that ordinary experience relates to the notion of proximity, whereas differently telerobotic is mediated experience does for the first part coincide with assumptions of cognitive perception theory that perception is direct (James Gibson, David Marr, Ulric Neisser). However, the second part of the argument refers to the historically philosophical discourse on mediated knowledge that starts with RenÚ Descartes and albeit criticism in principle prolonges the duality of mediated versus immediate perception up to the present.

The debate of mediated versus immediate knowledge holds a prominent position in most of the contributions. Questions about mediation of experience, knowledge and perception are raised in the book explicitely in relation to tele-technologies in ways that deliberately refer to the conception of knowledge as it stems form the history of skepticism and raises doubt about the reliability of the 'instruments' of perception. What is mainly confirmed in the collection of essays is the Cartesian aspect of mediation inherent to perception, because it is with the advent of Cartesian doubt that the notion of mediated perception has been attributed to knowledge. Again it is Dreyfus who traverses the the body-mind separation in the history of discourse and points out that what is lacking in telepresence is clearly defined by Merleau-Ponty's term "intercorporiality" that describes a more basic element than actual experience. It is "our sense of being in the presence of other people.

Furthermore, Dreyfus agrees with Albert Borgmann's phenomenological assumptions in the same book that ordinary perception is qualified by "inexhaustible richness of reality repleteness" so that differently, "the presentation of reality in cyberspace is shallow and discontinuous". Borgmann in his approach on "nearness and farness" clearly differs from Wilson's dual concept of real and fictional and discusses shifts in the paramenter of time and space that result from technology's cancellation of the dimensionality of time and space. Borgmann examines proximity in terms of continuity and density and concludes that the "brittleness" of cyberspace expresses its lack of "metric". Not only, as Dreyfus states, is telepresence at best a "poor imitation" of direct perception, according to Borgmann it also lacks dimensionality.

It might be intersting to annotate here, that repleteness, the key term in Borgmann's and Dreyfus' argument that describes the richness lacking in "tele-technologies", is also discussed in another timely debate on media elements. In particular Gilles Deleuze and Edmond Couchot in the French media debate hold the argument that spatial and temporal feaures, namely directionality and dimensionality, are fundamentally lacking in new technologies.

Although Martin Jay, an expert on 'new French philosophy' does not explicitely refer to this debate, he interestingly explores changes in the temporal-spatial setting of perception processes. Jay's correlates insights from the history of optics to the contemporary debate on reality and simulation and in a critical reading of Jonathan Crary's stress on "disembodied vision" (based on the 'camera obscura') concludes that the unavoidable "gap" between "appearance and essence, subjective experience and objective stimulus" always provides a "delay in time". The point is that the discovery of the speed of light in seventeenth century by Ole Roemer not only proves delay so that we do not see what is but what "rather is no longer". Furthermore there is evidence of "indexical traces of reality" that according to Jay are not dissolved in virtual reality and telerobotic technologies. The strong point in Jay's argument is to say "telerobotics resisits reduction to an apparatus of pure simulacral construction". Interestingly, Jay affirms the idea of "mediated perception of a distant reality", however the decisive factor that "appearance through technological mediation is the only reality we can know" rather conforms the notion of "one world", but remote.

While Dreyfus' critique on skepticism adds that remote control also means to avoid risk, Marina Grzinic provides a political-military context for the understanding of the specific clean "look" of new technological images. Grzinic develops the argument that "telerobotic time-delay" which occurs in the transmission of live images unveil the "aura" of the image - that accoring to Walter Benjamin gets lost in technical perfection. Grzinic makes the point that technological imperfections in time delay let shine through evidence of the real world whereas the cleaned up images result from a "process of sterilization" that implies a process of veiled "information about the 'dirty' and very real war in Bosnia and Herzegovina."

The issue of reliability forms a major concern throughout the book that brings together different views from philosophy, the history and theory of arts, and applied sciences that in multifaceted ways try to comprehend how new technologies foster belief in "direct" communication albeit the use of "remote" tele-manipulation. Since the majority of the essays collected in the book take the key duality as unquestioned assumption, the focus is mainly to develop further criticism and sub-categories without really questioning the epistemoligical setting, however, as I wanted to emphasize, there are interesting ways to connect telepistomology to applied cognitive science that are opening other avenues of approach.

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