Redbot robot art
This haphazard arrangement of forms will be the future of artistic harmony.
Wassily Kandinsky
The mind as brain-at-work can be made visible.
E.O.Wilson
Based on ants and other social insect studies, I have tried to reproduce artificially a similar emergent behavior in a robot swarm. These insects communicate among themselves through chemical messages, the pheromones, based on which they produce certain patterns of collective behavior, like follow a trail, clean up, repair and build nests, defense, attack or territory conquest. Despite pheromone not being the exclusive way of communication among these insects - the touch of antennas in ants or the dance in bees are equally important -, pheromonal language produces complex cognition via bottom-up procedures. Pheromone expression is dynamic, making use of increments and decrements, positive and negative feedbacks. Messages are amplified when pheromone is reinforced, and lose "meaning" when breeze disperses it. It is also an indirect communication, coined stigmergy from the Greek stigma/sign and ergon/action. Between the individual who places the message and the one who is stimulated by it, there is no proximity or direct relation.
Following these principles, in my first ant-robots (2001) I have replaced pheromone by color. The marks left by one robot triggers a pictorial action on other robots. Through this apparent random mechanism abstract paintings are generated, which reveal well defined shapes and patterns. My robots create abstract paintings that seem at first sight just random doodles, but after some reflexive observation color clusters and patterns become patent. Through the recognition of the color marks left by a robot, the others react to it reinforcing certain color spots.
The process is thus everything but arbitrary, stemming from a creative technique analogue to millions of years of evolution.
As far as I know, ArtSBot (Art Swarm Robots) was the first project to use emergent organization for developing robot creativity. Every previous experiment focused exclusively on randomness or sometimes on target strategies leading the machines to fulfill a pre-determined program created by the human artist.
On the contrary, ArtSBot was ment to put into practice the utmost possible machine autonomy, aimed at producing original paintings.
In operational terms, ArtSBot consists of a series of small "turtle" type robots, equipped with two felt pens and a pair of RGB sensors pointing to the painting plan. With these "eyes" the robots seek color (I have coined it: chromotaxis), determine if it is hot or cold, choose the corresponding pen and strengthen it by a constant or variable trace. To begin the process, when the canvas is still blank, the robots leave here and there a small spot of color randomly. Based on these simple rules, unique paintings are produced: from a random background stands out a well defined composition with intense shapes of color. In other words, initial randomness generates "order". The process is emergent and based on the properties of stigmergy.
The artistic product of these robots is entirely original. In the same way that somebody who writes a book cannot be considered as a mere instrument of his primary school teacher, robots cannot be seen as simple instruments of the artist that conceived and programmed them. There is an effective incorporation of new and non pre-determined information in the process. And that cannot be called anything but creativity.
It is true that consciousness is lacking to this creativity. But if we look at the history of modern art, it is obvious that, for example, surrealism tried to produce art works exactly in these same terms.
The "pure psychic automatism", the quintessential definition of the movement itself, appeared as a spontaneous, non-conscious and without any aesthetic or moral intention technique.
In the first Surrealist Manifesto André Breton defined the concept in this way: "Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express (...) the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations".
In the field of the visual arts, it is Pollock who better fulfills this intention by splashing ink onto the canvas with the purpose of representing nothing but the action itself. This was coined Action Painting, as it is well-known. Perhaps, because of that, the first paintings from my robots are, aesthetically, so similar to the ones of Pollock or André Masson, another important automatism based painter. In his surrealist period, this artist tried frequently to prompt a low conscious state by going hungry, not sleeping or taking drugs, so that he could release himself from any rational control and therefore letting emerge what at the time, in the path of Freud, was called the subconscious.
The absence of conscience, external control or pre-determination, allow my painting robots to engender creativity in its pure state, without any representational, aesthetic or moral intention.
RAP (Robotic Action Painter), created in 2006 for the Museum of Natural History in New York, is an individualist artist and not a swarm, but makes use of the same composition methods based on stigmergy and emergence. This robot is additionally able to determine, by its own means, the moment in which the painting is finished. Previous versions didn't have this capacity being conditioned by battery discharge or my will to stop the process. RAP's decision is taken based on the information that it gathers directly from the painting, what produces a considerable variation of time and form, since RAP can decide that the work is complete after a relatively short while (entailing accordingly a low pictorial expression) or can extend the picture construction for a quite long period, making it much more dense and complex. The "secret" of this behavior is in the significant change of the sensors, which passed from two to nine "eyes", allowing now the reading of local patterns, in addition to color spots. RAP is also my first robot to sign its works.
ISU, the poet robot also created in 2006, has the ability to write letters and words producing poems and emergent compositions based on the letter, quite similarly to the Lettrism style, artistic movement that followed Surrealism.
These references to 20th century art movements do not seek any kind of historical legitimacy, but are intended simply to show how certain morphogenesis processes produce similar results in human as well as non-human artists.
My painting robots generate art works based on emergence. The essential of those creations is based on the machine own interpretation of the world and not on its human description. No previous plan, fitness, aesthetical taste or artistic model is induced. The robots are just machines dedicated to their art.
Creativity is not an exclusive ability of human culture and it can be acknowledge in the same way in the physical, biological and artificial world.
<- Main
contact
