Leonel Moura (born December 26, 1948, in Lisbon, Portugal) is a conceptual artist whose work shifted in the late 1990s from photo based work to Artificial Intelligence and Robotic art. Since then he has produced several Painting Robots and the Robotarium, a zoo for robots. RAP (Robotic Action Painter) (2006) is a robot that makes drawings based on emergence and stigmergy, decides when the work is ready, and signs it, is displayed as a permanent installation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
ArtSbot (Art Swarm Robots), 2003, comprise several small autonomous robots, called Mbots, each equipped with color detection sensors, obstacle avoidance sensors, a microcontroller and actuators, for locomotion and pen manipulation. Mbots have two distinct behaviors: the random behavior that initializes the process by activating a pen, based on a small probability (usually 2/256), whenever the color sensors read white; and the positive feed-back behavior that reinforces the color detected by the sensors, activating the corresponding pen (since there are two pens, the color circle is split into two ranges - 'warm' and 'cold'). With this process the collective set of robots generate compositions where from a random background some color clusters emerge.
RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006, work alone but based on the same principles of emergence and stigmergy. Some improvements however produce rather distinct compositions from those of the ArtSbot swarm. Some of the new skills are: to determine the length and shape of each trace, the capacity to decide, in a non-linear mode, the moment to stop and the ability to sign. Additionally RAP works with six color pens and the RGB sensors are disposed in a grid of 3x3 which permits to detect local patterns and not only colors.
ISU, 2006, is very similar to RAP but is able to write letters and build words. In this fashion it makes compositions that resemble some of the Lettrist works from the 1950s and automatism.
Robotarium X is a large-scale steel glass construction lodging forty-five different robots, most powered by photovoltaic energy and fully autonomous.
RUR, the birth of the robot
In 2010 Leonel Moura creates a new version of the theatre play RUR with robots.
R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots is a classic playwright written by Karel Capek in the 1920s in which the word ROBOT was coined. Men and robots clash resulting in the extermination of mankind and the emergence of robots as a new dominant species. The play was always staged with human actor’s transvestite as robots. Moura’s new version displays, for the first time, real robots interacting on stage with human actors.
RUR, the birth of the robot, debuted in August 2010 at the Itáu Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil. During the 2017 edition of The New Art Fest (Lisbon) the artist installed BeBot, [6] a swarm of robot-painters demonstratimg the idea of future autonomous art.
Moura, Leonel et al. (2009) INSIDE [art and science], Lisbon, LxXL edition
Moura, Leonel (2009) Robot Poetry, Coimbra, Water Museum edition
Moura, Leonel (2009) RAP (Robotic Action Painter), Tavira, Tavira Museum Edition
Moura, Leonel (2007) Robotarium, Lisbon, LxXL edition
Moura, Leonel et al. (2005) Bioart - A new Kind of Art, Lisbon, Edition: Prates Gallery
Moura, Leonel and Pereira, Henrique Garcia (2004) Man + Robots: Symbiotic Art, Villeurbanne, Institut d'Art Contemporain, Lyon/Villeurbanne
Moura, Leonel (2003) Formigas, Vagabundos e Anarquia (Portuguese), Lisbon, Edition: AAAL, Out-of-print
Moura, Leonel et al. (2002) Architopia, Cascais. Utopia Biennial
Moura, Leonel (1995) Impossibilité (French), Villeurbanne, Edition: Institut d'Art Contemporain, Lyon/Villeurbanne
R.U.R. is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. "R.U.R." stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole. R.U.R. became influential soon after its publication. By 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages. R.U.R. was successful in its time in Europe and North America. Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in his 1936 novel War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant-class in human society.
Antoni Muntadas is a postconceptual multimedia artist, who resides in New York since 1971. His work often addresses social, political and communications issues through different media: such as photography, video, text and image publications, the Internet, and multi-media installations.
Torres Vedras is a municipality in the Portuguese district of Lisbon, approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the capital Lisbon in the Oeste region, in the Centro of Portugal. The population as of 2011 was 83,075, in an area of 407.15 square kilometres (157.20 sq mi).
Pierre Bismuth is a French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. His practice can be placed in the tradition of conceptual art and appropriation art. His work uses a variety of media and materials, including painting, sculpture, collage, video, architecture, performance, music, and film. He is best known for being among the authors of the story for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay alongside Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. Bismuth made his directorial debut with the 2016 feature film Where is Rocky II?.
Jean Dupuy was a French-born American artist and pioneer of work combining art and technology. He worked in the fields of conceptual art, performance art, painting, installations, sculptures, and video art. In the 1970s he curated many performance art events involving different artists from Fluxus, the New York's avant-garde and neo-dada scene. Many of his works are part of important collections, such as Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAMAC of Nice.
Jean Rustin was a French painter and prominent figurative artist.
Antoni Taulé is a Spanish painter, architect, and performer. A street artist during the sixties, his art has been labelled as part of hyperrealism and a representative of the “new figurative” movement. He paints classical empty buildings and interiors: ballrooms, office receptions, halls of the Louvre museum, chambers of the Prado, the Palace of Versailles, monumental spaces that fuse reality and fiction under a fleeting atmosphere of light.
The building is actually just like a person. It has a heart, lungs, a nervous system, intestines, and eyes ... I am fascinated with what one can see, with the reason why does one look at it or avoid looking, and how one reflects upon what he sees. In one word my work is about how a man functions.
Leonel Jules is a Contemporary Canadian painter from Montreal, Quebec, originally from Haiti. A graduate of the Université du Québec in Fine Arts, he has done research in history and semiotics of art. After receiving numerous awards and fellowships, he devoted himself to painting and the diffusion of art though Art-Media a television show, now a research center Art-Media whose mission is to educate and help discover contemporary art.
Melik Ohanian is a French contemporary artist of Armenian origin. He lives and works in Paris and New York City. His work has been shown in many solo exhibitions including Galerie Chantal Crousel, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, South London Gallery in London, De Appel in Amsterdam, IAC in Villeurbanne, Yvon Lambert in New York, Museum in Progress in Vienna, and Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile.
Robin Kid a.k.a. The Kid is an autodidact multidisciplinary neo-Pop contemporary artist from Dutch descent. His works hijack a variety of social, political, and traditional imagery of the past and present, with rebellious, religious, fantastical, and in some ways offensive undertones. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, the entertainment industry, and his childhood memories, to produce ambitious, enigmatic, and thought-provoking narratives, which question our polarized world of the 21st century. He confronts the audience with, among other notions, social determinism and the thin frontier between innocence and corruption within his young generation in modern societies. Robin Kid a.k.a. The Kid lives and works in Paris, France where he has his main studio for drawings and paintings and in Amsterdam, the Netherlands for sculptures.
Meir Eshel, known professionally as Absalon, was an Israeli-French artist and sculptor.
Jean Daviot is a French contemporary artist born in Digne. He went to the art school at the Villa Arson in Nice and lives and works in Paris.
Jacques Hérold was a prominent surrealist painter born in Piatra Neamț, Romania.
Jesús Carles de Vilallonga i Rosell was a Spanish/Canadian figurative artist who worked primarily in the medium of egg tempera. He is best known for his richly textured paintings in an intricate, highly colored style that is not easy even though everything is readily intelligible: male and females characters, beasts, forests, architectural structures and artifacts. Vilallonga's iconography draws from a broad and complex painting tradition ranging from Romanesque art, the Renaissance, and Surrealism, while maintaining his own contemporary style. His work is sometimes related to Symbolism and his production is always enhanced by the contributions of abstraction. He works with the "inner eye" which Freud described as the most profound and the most intelligent, in a sojourn through nature and man's hidden interior.
Hervé Télémaque was a French painter of Haitian origin, associated with the surrealism and the narrative figuration movements. He lived and worked in Paris from 1961 on.
Amina Zoubir is a contemporary artist, filmmaker and performer from Algiers, Algeria. She is known as a feminist performer through video-actions entitled Take your place, which she directed in 2012 during the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence, aiming to question gender issues and conditions of women in Algerian society. She has worked with different art mediums such as sculpture, drawing, installation art, performance and video art. Her work relates to notions of body language in specific spaces of North Africa territories.
Catherine Francblin is a French art critic, art historian, and independent curator.
Vincent Bioulès is a French painter, born on March 5, 1938 in Montpellier, where he lives and works.
Stéphane Kreienbühl, known as Stéphane Belzère, is a Franco-Swiss painter. He lives and works between Paris and Basel.
External links
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