Mrns1

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A robot that keeps humans human

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The night of the first of January container ship MSC Zoe lost 281 containers, littering the beaches of the Dutch Wadden Islands with waste, and, much worse, causing an ecological disaster that will impact coastal and marine wildlife in the region for years. News in the Netherlands spread fast, with impressive photos of beaches filled with soaked consumer goods, plastic packing material and styrofoam. This time the pollution was easy to witness and hard to miss. Nine out of ten times though, marine pollution is happening far away from us, never to be registered. Occasionaly a big disaster will make it to the news, or can be witnessed during travels or holidays, but this is just a minor fraction of the human assaults on or seas and oceans.

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Even more important is the fact that environmental problems have become so large, they’ve grown beyond the human scope, meaning problems are too big for us to deal with in a human way. Environmental disasters thus get the status of unavoidable natural phenomena, meaning they are just there and just happen, making room for a passive, defeatist attitude towards these problems. Even when we collaborate and set up foundations or make political laws, the feeling persists that these efforts are “a drop in the ocean”. ‘It’ goes on, whatever we do, so what can we do to change this?

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This train of thoughts led to the idea to build a man-made creature, that watches over our oceans, telling us what happens and helping us to react accordingly. It’s there to revitalize our connection with the sea, and our connections to our empathical self. Information about the wellbeing of our seas has been there for everybody to request for years, the internet provides for this, but we have forgotten how we should deal with this in a humane way. What are numbers, what’s a new disaster, when these don’t happen right in our face, on the beaches of our most beloved islands? We shake our heads and click for the next news item. In these times, where everybody is overloaded with information, we need a watch, that not only filters information, but mirrors how we should feel. A watchtower, that doesn’t protect ships, but protects what will be hardened in us, if we do nothing. A lighthouse, that shines light on stuff we can’t look away from. The perfect icon? A teddybear-robot.

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“..., we need a watch, that not only filters information, but mirrors how we should feel. A watchtower, that doesn’t protect ships, but protects what will be hardened in us, if we do nothing. A lighthouse, that shines light on stuff we can’t look away from. The perfect icon? A teddybear- robot.”

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A teddybear-robot, yes. So big, you can’t look away from it, so high it can be seen from a mile away, walking on the beach. Showing us in a glimpse how our oceans are doing. A teddybear, evoking feelings of security, safety, childhood, love, empathy and attachment. Made from marine waste, transforming stuff nobody wants into something that stirs the imagination. A teddybear, with mechanisms on the inside that reproduce emotions, making movement and facial expression possible. Linked to benchmarks regarding marine pollution, it can be programmed to react independantly to the things that happen behind the horizon and underneath the surface. A typical robot, with untypical human characteristics.

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Because of the crowd-sourced character of the project, artists, developers and engineers can make their own ocean watch creature somewhere along another coastline, in a harbor, on a square, or even a small one for indoors. So whenever something happens out at sea, be it positive or negative, these fantasy creatures will start reacting to it autonomously. And when you’re not around to see for yourself, you can monitor their behavior online and thus see how our seas are doing.

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“Because of the crowd-sourced character of the project, artists, developers and engineers can make their own ocean watch creature somewhere along another coastline, in a harbor, on a square, or even a small one for indoors.”

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Building Mrns1, the first ever built ocean watch robot, brings forward questions about hi-tech recycling, robotics, nature conservation, art, crowdsourcing and compassion. The 281 containers that fell off the MSC Zoe caused a disaster of a magnitude the North Sea hasn’t experienced in many years, but if it leads to the creation of a network of ocean watchers, thus so creating more awareness for our planet, it hasn’t been for nothing. Any help with realising these beautiful and exciting new creatures will be super helpful, so please get in touch.

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