Marilyn retouched...
Leonel Moura
The Painting Robots were created to paint. Not my paintings but their own paintings. Such an objective may seem simple but in fact it adresses some of the most critical ideas on art, robotics and artificial intelligence. Let me start with intelligence.
Today we understand intelligence as a basic feedback mechanism. If a system, any system, is able to respond to a certain stimulus in a way that it changes itself or its environment we can say that some sort of intelligence is present. ‘Sheer’ intelligence is therefore something that doesn’t need to refer to any kind of purpose, target or quantification. It may plainly be an interactive mechanism of any kind, with no other objective than to process information and to react in accordance to available output capabilities.
Yet this is not what we usually observe in most of the artificial intelligence undertakings. For one part because human intelligence is still seen as the ‘great’ model to be followed and by which all the experiments should be measured and evaluate. Artificial intelligence is in general a shadow of what we believe to be the human mind and behavior.
As opposed to this, the painting robots were built without any previous intelligence model, human or other. The idea was to make an artificial being able to do paintings without any external reference or requirements. That is why I don’t use fitness constraints or optimization parameters. It is the simple mechanism of feedback and stigmergy that is at work here. Such a project cannot be evaluated in terms of any kind of human accomplishment or natural behavior.
The painting robots are nothing more than a singular species, with a particular form of intelligence and a kind of life of its own. They do paintings as other species build nests, change habitats or create social affiliations.
Viewed simply as robots, i.e. autonomous and intelligent machines, they are also distinct from the ‘mainstream’. Their aim is not to simulate animal behavior or any type of classical embodied process. All the parts that they are made of, and all the actions they are able to perform derive from the single purpose of making their own paintings. That is why they have visual sensors in order to recognize colors, wheels to move, a brain to process information and a device to paint. Even the decorative aspect was brought to a minimum. The painting robots were specifically created as a new form of life dedicated to the production of paintings. Not more not less.
If robots would appreciated art, the Painting Robots artworks would probably be the ones they would liked most. They are a true intelligent machine expression. But, since we, humans, are for the time being the only meditative observers, the relation between machine art and human aesthetics perception is of great interest. I believe that we don’t fully understand these paintings. Complexity is easy to explain but not so easy to grasp when we see it at work. Anyway, many of us like the paintings, probably because we seem to gladly embrace fractal or chaotic structures. But, more than shapes and colors, what some of us really like here is the idea and the associated process. In this sense, these robotic paintings are a provocative conceptual art that problematizes the boundaries of art as we know it.
In my practical experience with these robots I have generally fed them with a blank canvas and color pens choosen at random. But sometimes I have also provided a canvas already painted with a previous image, a seed, which the robots take as a starting point to create a superimposed composition. In the human eye’s perspective, this looks like a correction or comment on the given image, even if the robots never sees the whole of it, reacting only to local information. Our interpretation of the final painting is thus affected by the common gestalt mechanism and more strongly by moral, political or aesthetical aspects that are completely out of the process. In this sense, these particular paintings are a very good metaphor of our intrinsic difficulty to relate with intelligent machine behavior (or any kind of information that does not derive from our own cognitive models).
In the series where I have use Warhol’s Marilyn as a seed, this issue is clearly raised. The robots just react to an environment with much defined contrasts. Therefore they are prone to paint over the more graphic shapes, as mouth or eyes. This, for us, constitutes a profanation of the portrait, a kind of an iconoclastic statement that arises the terrific vision of a world dominated by destructive machines.
In conclusion, I am not aiming to build domesticated robots (and it is not by accident that one of the most current well-known robot it’s a dog...) but, on the contrary, I will currently keep on trying to create intelligent and autonomous machines dedicated to its own life and art. In fact I don’t see the Marilyn Seed paintings as a destructive manifesto, but instead as the positive construction of a new kind of art or as I like to put it: The End Of Art As We Know It and the opening of a vast field of artistic experiments - human and non-human.
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