A mail pinged through datasphere to alert me to the Robotarium, a new environment by Leonel Moura whose artistic robots I’ve always had a soft silicon spot for. The robots work tirelessly producing rectilinear action paintings; Obsessive maps of deep-space robot lay-line connections.
“A set of autonomous robots, each supporting two colour 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.â€?
I also recommend Hectors stunning graffiti work. Hector, whose body parts consist of some electric motors, belts, cables, a laptop, a battery and a spray can holder, is controlled from Adobe Illustrator via a scripting environment for AI called Scriptographer.
From a more political angle The Institute of Applied Autonomy offer us GraffitiWriter – “a tele-operated field programmable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometres per hourâ€?
GraffitiWriter was developed in response to the advent of next generation military/police technologies for urban surveillance.
I suppose to many of us a robot is seen as mechanical/computational device with a morphology that resembles a human being or animal. Plotters are really robots too, its just their hands are made of fine points and arm movements are confined to simple range.