Photo: Miguel Ribeiro Fernandes
11.05.04, 10 mbots, ink on canvas, 400 x 500 cm
14.03.04, 3 mbots, ink on canvas, 190 x 160 cm
02.04.04, 3 mbots, ink on canvas, 190 x 160 cm
30.04.04, 3 mbots, ink on canvas, 160 x 190 cm
28.04.04, 4 mbots, ink on canvas, 100 x 200 cm
At work...
[Making the Artists that make the Art]
1) Machines can make art
2) Man and machines can make symbiotic art
3) Symbiotic art is a new paradigm that opens an entire unexploited field in art
4) Object manufacturing and the reign of the hand in art can be abandoned
5) Personal expression and of the human/artist centrality can be abandoned
6) Any moralistic or spiritual pretension and any representation purposes can be abandoned
A set of autonomous robots, each supporting two color marker pens, invest a white canvas. At the beginning they move in a straight and indifferent manner imprinting here and there small ink dots. As these casual strokes meet to form small patches, the robots become more active. When colour is recognized, they choose the pen corresponding to the same shade and reinforce it. The excitement grows and soon amazing forms emerge filling the canvas. At a given moment, determined by his sense of rightness, the human partner decides to put an end to robots’ activity. The artwork is ready.
The experiment is innovative in many ways. The art object is the product of a non-human entity, indifferent to concerns about representation, essence or purpose. In fact we are dealing with unmanned painting-vehicules driven by randomness and stigmergy. The artists/robots are not concerned with individuality or identity; they function collectively and perceive the world as a common ground shaped by indirect communication through the environment.
The creativity behind the artwork emerges from a symbiotic relationship between human and machines, where cooperation and collective behaviour are critical to the outcome. The individualistic bias is overcome by the acceptance of a multitude of forms of expression, some human, some bioinspired, some machinistic. Art is the totality of life as it could be.
Furthermore there is no predetermined objective or aesthetic fitness. The paintings achieve the ultimate 'pure psychic automatist', as announced by Breton, modified in the ‘materialistic’ sense by Jorn, and partially carried out by Pollock.
Art-making robots may change not only our views about art and philosophy but also the condition of mankind. What is the point of persisting in doing something that machines do better and in a much more ensuing way? If art has no purpose, as it is uttered by modern and postmodern theories, then machines are the best creators. Liberated from the manufacture of art, we can concentrate in generating a new kind of artist emerging from the protobiotic soup of robotics and artificial life. We can make the machines that make the art. We can create a non-human life devoted to the artistic realm. That is, art as it could be.
The art of the 21st century.
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