Swarm drawings demonstrate the potential of new kind of art (non-human art) based on artificial creativity, were the human acts a leader/influencer of an intelligent system with emergent behavior. To expand the artistic creation, artists such as Leonel Moura (…) used autonomous robots with embedded reactive and stigmergy behavior inspired by ants. Leonel Moura (2002) is the first artist who coined swarm art as a new kind of art with his swarm painting created by the painting robots with distinct patterns and compositional aesthetics.
Creativity in these artworks emerges from self-organizing behavior of the robots driven by their interaction with the environment and an in-direct communication strategy (the color trace or patch of the other robots). A pioneer artwork in this category is ARTsBot (2003), a series of autonomous robots capable of co-evolving within the canvas by adding and sensing ink (the chromatic stimulus presence of other robots). These robots are capable of the distributed feedback, which is in-turn affecting their collective behavior.
Moura further explored the use of swarm robots for paintings in a series of artworks. ArtsBot: Art Swarm of Robots (2004), are swarm paintings created by ten autonomous robots through interaction and indirect communication inside an arena inspired by stigmergy behavior of ants. RAP: Robotic Action Painter (2006) are a series of swarm paintings done by an autonomous robot capable of random initialization, positive feedback, and adjusting the intensity of color as pheromone apparatus. The robot is able to decide on its own when the artwork ready. Unlike the previous robots which relied on human to finish the artwork RAP make autonomous aesthetic decision on its own.
A more advanced ant-like painting robot is BeBot (2017) built for the Astana Expo2017. Each robot detects its own color (blue, red or green) and reacts to it. To start the process, they make some initial lines if color is not found for a certain period of time. This means that when the canvas starts to be filled with color the random behavior stops. In such a fashion, small groups of robots (4-9) can generate unique paintings based on emergent behavior and stigmergy. The Astana Paintings demonstrates that creativity, a mechanism similar to intelligence, can be introduced in machines.