A BRIEF TOUR OF ROBOTIC ART

What is a ROBOT?

An independent machine – they work by themselves or by remote control

They sense their environment – various electronic sensors tell them about their environment

They can be programmed – they follow a set of instructions which can be changed

They move, either from place to place or they carry and handle objects.

Robots that look like people are called humanoid robots. Mars rover Spirit

Paul Beck, Robots, ©2009

What is Art?- ask Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Judgment”, discusses beauty, aka aesthetics, (beauty!) which many people find essential to the value of art. (This is what the manifesto writers objected to!)

Kant believed beautiful objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’. An object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

INGRES

CANOVA

Cupid and Psyche, at the Louvre

Theodor Adorno(1903-1969)

Art has formal autonomy – an object or event that exists on its own, has its own shape or paramenters

Art has intellectual import – “a conversation between content and form”

Art is embedded in society as a whole; it serves a social function

A modern definition: Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy;

RUR

R.U.R., often subtitled Rossum's Universal Robots in English, is a science fiction play in the Czech language by KarelČapek.

It introduced the word “Robot” in 1921. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial

people called "robots." Unlike the modern usage of the term, these creatures are closer to the modern idea of androids or even clones, as they can be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves.

As ever when we look at robots in culture, the real questions are, what does it mean to be human?

Being a socialist production, the robots end with a worker’s revolution!

RUR

Early examples of Automata

An automata is a mechanical toy

Some life-like behavior was modeled – card playing, writing, drawing

Pierrot by Vichy

Robots & Art

Robots that make art Artists-engineers that make robotic art

We’ll be spending time here today: interactive installations, robots that model animal or human behaviors, robots designed to follow the viewer and interact with them or behave differently when stimulated by the viewer.

Artists that perform with robots

Robotic artBill Vorn

Hysterical Machines & Red Light - Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh (USA), Apr. 22 - June 19, 2011

Each Hysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). Some machines are suspended from the ceiling and their arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robots to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. They react to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli they receive. The perceived emergent behaviors of these machines engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.

Suzi Webster

Electric Skin

Elumin8 printed LEDs, silk, sensors, breath, electricity

This wearable, responsive garment turns the intimate breath of the wearer into pulses of light. The inhalation and exhalation of the wearer activates a breath sensor that dims and brightens the printed LED of the garment. The wearer is engaged in an altered state of perception, bathed in the electric aqua light.

Electric Skin is a hybrid object/performance that questions divisions between ‘subject/object’ ‘inner/outer’ and ‘mind/body’ and creates an experience of that liminal space that is neither inside nor outside, but is a third space inbetween.

Ken Rinaldo

The artificial stomach in this installation controls and activates the robotic tongue. If the bacteria within the stomach is healthy and reproducing, then robotic tongue-chair senses the presence of the viewer/interactant reclines and delivers a deluxe 15 minute massage. When the interactant leaves the chair the robot tongue returns to an upright position.

Christian Moeller

Mojo

Robotic Light Installation, San Pedro, California, 2007

A robotic arm holding a theater spotlight shines a perfect circle of light onto the sidewalk corner of 7th and Centre Streets. Two videocameras attached to the roof of the building survey the area around the sculpture while Mojo tries to follow the passers-by with his light beam.

http://www.christian-moeller.com/display.php?project_id=62&play=true

Camille Utterback

Text Rain, 1999Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms.

http://camilleutterback.com/

Paul Granjon

2006, Heart beat machine

Simple computer-controlled beat machine. A padded motorised stick hits a piezo microphone and produces a convincing heart beat sound.

The heart lights-up in sync with the beat.

Marie Sester Fear, 2011FEAR is a

public art work that uses a common object as a focal point of emotional interaction.

Situated in the middle of a lobby, a table is illuminated from within, surrounded by sound producing chairs; all of them "breathing" peacefully. When this calming point of attraction is approached, the soothing light gradually becomes aggressive and the chairs start howling in agony. When left alone, the objects resume their peaceful existence

Alan Rath

I Like To Watch, 2000

Inspector, 1999

Steel, aluminum, electronics, computers, software, LCD

Chico Macmurtrie

the tapered, joined cone-shapes gradually inflate with air, lengthen and take form, eventually reaching out with a graceful wingspan, robust with life. The Birds then begin their stationary journey with a slow, elegant flapping motion, all 16 in a randomly generated sequence. The pneumatic mechanism that animates the work creates a constant, rhythmic breathing sound.

Erwin DriessensMaria Verstappen Tickle is a

small autonomous robot: a blank aluminium capsule that is fitted with a pair of nubbed rubber caterpillar tracks, to give a pleasurable tickling skin massage.

Jessica Field

Tantalus, 2005 This installation

is comprised of five electronically networked robots that interact with the viewer. The puppets are designed to have the goal of attaining as much motion as possible. The viewer’s motion triggers the robot's motion, via a motion sensor.

Jen Hall

Instrument for Mediated Terrain

Interactive Sculpture Hall: co-artist Blyth Hazen: co-artist The electronic devices

connect the gardens and caretake the moss; the botany altered in a subtle way by the viewers. The mechanical arms activate only when people come close to observe. The interaction between technology and the moss gardens directly depends on these visitors.