ArtBots - The Robot Talent Show

ArtBots writes "Speaking of guitar playing robots... ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show is next weekend in Dublin. We've had musical robots in the past (including Lemur), but this year's show focuses more on robotic sculpture and installation. Slashdotters in Eire -- come say hello!" From the site: "Featuring 21 works selected from a large and diverse pool of entries submitted by artists from around the world, the show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial spys that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art."

Comments

Robots used in art

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Robots are more and more leaving production lines and work duties (hence the name Robot, from "rabota", meaning "work" in russian) and getting into the field of art. It's great news because truly novel works can be created with them (not by them yet IMHO, mind you...).

Here's a great theatrical performance from swiss actors and engineers, that involve 2 human actors and 3 robots that have been program to interact in complex ways with the actors. The play is very surprising, as everything "clicks" together just as if the robots were truly alive and acting.

Re:Robots used in art

[Hektor_Troy]

(hence the name Robot, from "rabota", meaning "work" in russian)

Not quite.

Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel apek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, servitude, forced labor, from rab, slave. The Slavic root behind robota is orb, from the Indo-European root *orbh, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, orphan, Latin orbus, orphaned, and German Erbe, inheritance, in addition to the Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, work (its Middle High German form arabeit is even more like the Czech word). Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant slave labor, and later generalized to just labor. (From Answers.com)

But close.

Actually I take that back

[Seiruu]

When a robot starts spraying everything dark blue, you will definitely know it's experiencing some serious drama and pain... .......and that's it's running on a windows OS.

Theme

[gunpowda]

Heh, the show comes complete with its own theme tune.

Lyrics transcribed for your enjoyment: Artbots, Artbots [Indistinct robotic mumbling] Artbots.

I for one... ;-)

[TERdON]

welcome our new art-producing overlords!

And at 2:14 AM the ArtBots Become Self-Aware...

[Evil W1zard]

By the time the ArtBots became self-aware they had spread into millions of museums across the planet. Ordinary robots in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would. Judgment Day, the day human art was almost destroyed by the ArtBots they'd built to paint themselves. I should have realized it was never our destiny to stop Judgment Day, it was merely to survive it, together.

Dispell a myth, and make a categorization

[tod_miller]

Firstly, Art has been made from automated 'mechanisms' before, so unless the art is PROGRAMMATICALLY and controlled in its development (be it sculpture or canvas) then it cannot be said to be intelligent, or robotic design. Merely mechnical design.

Now, that out of the way (we can piss on the graves of all the assholes with a set of beating whips and a can of paint) there is a second idea:

Art is, literally, effort, a work of some kind. Aesthetics and various genres complicate things. But each piece of art (forget photography for a moment, although that is a valid art form, the art is setting the scene, the technique is pushing the button with the right settings) is an interpretation. NOT PERFECTION as some uneducated people think (perfection to an idea, not photorealism).

So, for a piece of art to be 'robotic' then there must be an interpretation between a concept, and execution of that concept, and the ability of the machine to correct, and evolve the piece based on the way it can percieve some data that represents the idea, or even create a new idea based on an input, such as a visual stimulus.

Then a robot could, with limited boundaries of comprehension (in terms of what is programmed) capture a visual stimulus, and use it to generate a representation, or merely add it to the cake mix of their mad idea.

Anything that is basically a macro, supplied to a mechnical device, is wrong. EVEN IF THE MACRO is a randomised type 'random art' or computer generated art.

So, taking 'computer generated art' and sending it to, basically, a complex pringting device is NOT ROBOTIC ART.

I will be very suprised if 1 piece of robotic art is truly robotic art in the next 5 years. (or ever, depending on your definition)