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."

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)