Cat Royale ‘sweeps up’ three international awards
The TAS project, Cat Royale has won the Webby People’s Voice Winner for the ‘Best Integrated Experience in the AI, Metaverse & Virtual’ category.
The Webby Awards, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), is an international awards organisation honouring excellence on the Internet.
The project also won awards at the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference and iBest Paper Award (top 1% of submitted papers) for the paper: Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans.
TAS initiated cultural ambassadors, Blast Theory, to deliver a landmark artwork called Cat Royale in which a small family of three cats, Ghostbuster, Clover, and Pumpkin, inhabited an AI-driven ‘cat utopia,’ at the centre of which a robot arm tried to enrich their lives by playing with them.
A video installation of the work exhibited at the Brisbane World Science Fair and the Science Gallery, London, engaged thousands of people with the deep questions of trust and autonomy posed by the seemingly simple idea of using AI to create such a utopia. The project also delivered research papers on designing robot worlds, embracing play with robots.
Cat Royale by Blast Theory was developed in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and funded by UKRI via the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub. It was co-commissioned by Queensland Museum for World Science Festival Brisbane 2023, and Science Gallery London.
Professor Sarvapali (Gopal) Ramchurn, Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Programme, from the University of Southampton said: “This project demonstrates the impact that can come from multi-disciplinary collaborations between academics from different backgrounds and artists. This creative provocation is meant to engage the public in thinking about the future of autonomous systems in our daily lives. It is very rewarding to see it ‘sweep up’ such a diverse set of awards, as well as be appreciated by thousands of people in galleries.”
Watch a clip from Cat Royale below or listen to the May 2024 episode of Robot Talk podcast.