A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to evoke human form, but most robots are task-performing machines, designed with an emphasis on stark functionality, rather than expressive aesthetics.
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.
Torres Vedras is a municipality in the Portuguese district of Lisbon, approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the capital Lisbon. It is part of the intermunicipal community Oeste and the region Oeste e Vale do Tejo. 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 a French multidisciplinary contemporary artist, from Dutch descent. His neo-pop artwork 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. 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.
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.
Jean Le Gac is a French conceptual artist, painter, pastelist, photographer using mixed media, frequently video or photography and text to document his investigations and sketched scenes. His poetic photographic interventions in which he is most often the main subject are accompanied either by typed text describing the underlying story in the artwork or handwritten notes in the art piece itself. Member of the Narrative art movement since the seventies, Le Gac ofttimes tells a story about an imaginary character that viewers can easily identify with the artist himself. He calls it a “metaphor for painting." Le Gac also uses the artist's book as a central part of his art practice. Le Gac is a Professor and lecturer at Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques.
Isa Melsheimer is a German sculptor, object and installation artist, painter and university lecturer.
