SPARE (not mine)

The roads of Los Angeles are littered with tread-worn tires. SPARE (not mine) is an autonomous sculptural work built from one of such tires. The city, known as the nation’s most car-oriented society, is at the beginning of the most dramatic change to transportation and human labor since the creation of the Ford Model T over 100 years ago in 1908 due to the appearance of the autonomous vehicle. Like the self-driving cars, the work uses electronic sensors and AI to gain understanding of itself and the world around it. It is built utilizing micro-computer, inertial measurement unit, etc. to determine its position, rotation, acceleration and objects in its path. The tire, perpetually moving and hitting the wall, leaves its mark along the way. The piece explores the use of AI and the rise of automation, and their effect on human life.
© 2018 Jonathan Fletcher Moore

A single tyre is repeatedly driving against a white gallery wall, leaving behind marks on the wall of its own existence. The work is a critical comment and a playful observation on the emergence of autonomous and self-driving cars. The idea of a car is reduced to a single tyre, its actions are reduced to their absolute will to drive and move forward, but the result is that it is repeatedly and seemingly without goal or direction banging against the wall. As in self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence is used to animate the tyre, to instill a sense of anima and autonomy. The marks left on the gallery wall are becoming trace fossils of the emergence of AI. Are they evidence of Machine Poesis or are they evidence of Machine Stupidity? Or are we humans restricting the AI to reach its full potential?
(Georg Tremmel)