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."

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 [robots-theatre.ch] 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 [answers.com])

But close.