I'm not sure how useful this week was for me or how successful my process was. I'm still pretty confused about the feedback that I got. The suggestion seems to be that my object associated too much with something, as ever there is a certain lottery about what response you receive, which is often frustrating when you work so hard. Though I acknowledge that I was too influenced by a James Auger lecture I attended which showed in my final outcome.
"Something never sat right with me about that," I said as I watched the puddles swelling in the rain.
"Why do they only copy what we already have."
Food was being slopped in tiny portions from large grey drums. A Ro-mu hovered by scanning for life. The rain fell and the queue stretched back for miles. The never ending queue, to eat from the drum. The man from downstairs began to reply.
"It's a way in." His creased and sickly face looked up, "Like a subtle evolution, one day its a real cat, the next it's robotic, its the only way we accept it."
We inched forward, probably using more energy in the act of queuing than we are likely to get from what meagre portions await us.
"Take the Ro-mu, it become its own species, but without the invention of the cat, it can't exist."
I saw he was half watching something and turned; a Ro-mu had captured and killed a mouse and was in the process of digesting it.
"So now we have a robotic mouse, eating real mice to survive, a pale replica of life." I said.
He showed no sign of having heard.
"Its not about looking back though, the real question is, what's next?"
He was right of course, as we watched the Ro-mu complete it's re-charge and begin scanning a feeble looking elderly lady. Collecting and uploading information, profiling the human species. On the wall in front of us, painted and un dimmed by the rain, showed a red symetrical symbol, an anti-human symbol seen a few times in shadowy corners throughout the last century, but this time not hidden or secretive but glowing in full public view.