Exhibition
Science Museum, London
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Until October 2020
DURHAM Cathedral鈥檚 stained glass windows inspired artist Dominic Wilcox鈥檚 contribution to Driverless, a tiny but thought-provoking exhibition at London鈥檚 Science Museum.
It occurred to could make traffic collisions a thing of the past, which means 鈥渨e don鈥檛 need the protection systems that are built into contemporary cars鈥�, he told design magazine Dezeen. 鈥淲e can just have a shell of any design.鈥�
His Stained Glass Driverless Sleeper Car of the Future is the sort of vehicle we may be driving when road safety has improved to the point where we can build cars out of whatever we want. It suggests a future in which safety is no longer a set of barriers, cages, buffers and lights, and is instead a dance of algorithms. Rather than measuring out a bike lane, say, we will have an algorithm that decides whether to leave a smaller distance to the bicycle on its left to reduce the chance of hitting a truck on its right.
What if that causes more cyclists, but fewer passengers, to die every year? Such questions aren鈥檛 new. But they are having to be asked again and in a different and disconcerting form as we move more safety systems off the roads and into vehicles.
On show is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 , a website using more than 40 million participants鈥� decisions on what to do in certain situations to inform our autonomous machinery design. The findings can be unsettling: would-be designers are more likely to sacrifice your safety if you are fat, a criminal or a dog
This is a show as much about possible futures as it is about the present. Interviews, archival footage, models and some interactive displays create a series of provocations, more than a fully fledged exhibition.
I especially liked the look of the MIT Senseable City Lab and the AMS Institute鈥檚 鈥淩oboats鈥�, currently on trial on Amsterdam鈥檚 canals. These autonomous floating platforms form spontaneous bridges and event platforms and can transport goods and people.
The exhibition spends much of its time off-road, investigating drone swarms and privacy, flocking behaviour and mine clearance, ocean mapping and planetary surveillance.
Don鈥檛 let its size put you off: this little show is full of big surprises.
