Robotic art is any artwork that employs some form of robotic or automated technology. There are many branches of robotic art, one of which is robotic installation art, a type of installation art that is programmed to respond to viewer interactions, by means of computers, sensors and actuators. The future behavior of such installations can therefore be altered by input from either the artist or the participant, which differentiates these artworks from other types of kinetic art.
Early examples of robotic art and theater existed in ancient China as far back as the Han dynasty (c. third century BC), with the development of a mechanical orchestra, and other devices such as mechanical toys. These last included flying automatons, mechanized doves and fish, angels and dragons, and automated cup-bearers, all hydraulically actuated for the amusement of emperors by engineer-craftspeople whose names have mostly been lost to history. However, Mo Ti and the artificer Yen Chin are said to have created automated chariots. [1] By the time of the Sui dynasty (sixth century AD), a compendium was written called the Shai Shih t'u Ching, or "Book of Hydraulic Excellencies". There are reports that the Tang dynasty saw Chinese engineers building mechanical birds, otters that swallowed fish, and monks begging girls to sing.
An early innovator in the Western world was Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD), who wrote "On Automatic Theaters, On Pneumatics, and on Mechanics", and is said to have built fully automated theatrical set-pieces illustrating the labors of Hercules among other wonders.
In the thirteenth century AD, Badi Al-Zaman'Isma'il Al-Razzaz Al-Jazari was a Muslim inventor who devoted himself to mechanical engineering. Like Hero, he experimented with water clocks and other hydraulic mechanisms. [2] Al-Jaziri's life's work culminated in a book which he called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, completed in 1206 AD, and often known simply as Automata. In Europe, also in the thirteenth century, Villard de Honnecourt is known to have built mechanical angels for the French court, and in the fifteenth century Johannes Muller built both a working mechanical eagle and a fly.
The Prague Astronomical Clock, in Prague's Old Town Square, features four animatronic figures representing Vanity, Greed, Death, and Entertainment. The clock was built in 1410, and the first of the figures, Death, was probably added in 1490. [3] In the 15th-16th century, Leonardo da Vinci invented several theatrical automata, including a lion which walked onstage and delivered flowers from its breast, [4] and a moving suit of armour.
The magician Isaac Fawkes, in 1722, created a clock that "played a variety of tunes on the organ, flute and flangolet with birds whistling and singing". He also had a mechanism called the "Temple of the Arts", which featured mechanical musicians, ships and ducks. Fawkes also created a robotic apple tree that would grow, bloom, and produce fruit before the eyes of an unsuspecting audience. This tree was the inspiration for the orange tree illusion in the film The Illusionist . In the same period, a Swiss watchmaker called Pierre Jaquet-Droz made some highly sophisticated automotas, including "The Writer" (made of 6,000 pieces), "The Musician" (2,500 pieces) and "The Draughtsman" (2,000 pieces). [5] These devices are mechanical analog computers and can still be seen in working condition at the Art and History Museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Also surviving to this day is a mechanical theatre that was constructed in the gardens of Hellbrun (near Salzburg), Austria, from 1748 to 1752. Within a cross-section of an 18th-century palace, 141 hydraulically operated figures, representing people from all walks of life, can be seen going about their daily activities. [6]
Advances in engineering created new possibilities for robotic art. In 1893, Prof. George Moore created "The Steam Man", a humanoid mechanism powered by a boiler, which he exhibited in New York City. Supported by a horizontal bar attached to a vertical post, it was capable of walking in a circle at a speed of four or five miles an hour; reportedly, it could not be held back by two men. [7] In 1898, the physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla demonstrated a remote-controlled boat in Madison Square Garden, making use of a specially built indoor pond. This device has been identified as the world's first radio-controlled vessel. Tesla described it as having "a borrowed mind", and envisioned a fleet of fifty or a hundred submarines, or any other kind of vehicle, under the command of one or several operators. [8]
In 1981, Warhol worked on a project with Peter Sellars and Lewis Allen that would create a traveling stage show called, Andy Warhol:A No Man Show, with a life-sized animatronic robot in the exact image of Warhol. [9] The Andy Warhol Robot would then be able to read Warhol's diaries as a theatrical production. [10] The play would be based on Warhol's books The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Exposures. Warhol was quoted as saying, "I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?" [11] [12]
Robotics have now become a mode of expression for artists confronting fundamental issues and contradictions in our advanced industrial culture.
Robotic performance art refers to the presentation of theatrical performances in which most, if not all, of the "action" is executed by robots rather than by people. An early robotic artist was Edward Ihnatowicz, whose creation, the Senster, was exhibited in the Netherlands from 1970 to 1974. It employed sensors and hydraulics which reacted to the sound and movements of the people nearby. Shows of this sort are sometimes large and elaborate productions. The Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) created kinetic sculptures usually made from industrial junk. They were hallucinatory and fabulous machines which performed unpredictably until they inevitably met a tragic fate, which was often to self-destruct. His "Homage to New York", a 23-foot-high (7.0 m) and 27-foot-long (8.2 m) mechanism made of dismantled bikes and musical instruments, among other things, was displayed in 1960 in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it dramatically caught fire and self-destructed before a crowd of onlookers. [13] [14]
Pittsburgh has since the 1980's been an ongoing hub of performative robotic art-making. A steady series of robotic artists have had their origins in the Pittsburgh robotic art community or significantly developed their craft there. This includes Ken Goldberg, Ian Ingram, and Simon Penny who respectively developed "The Telegarden" (1995-2004), "On Beyond Duckling" (2004-2005), and Petit Mal (1989-2005) while in Pittsburgh. The confluence of an arts community that spans world famous institutions to bootstrapped collectives and the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute underpins Pittsburgh's outsized role in robotic arts.
David Karave's robotics and fire artwork, Home Automation, is an animatronic theatre performance, with themes of propaganda and peace. This robotic artwork was created over 3 years, by more than 30 artists in the US and Canada. The project has toured across the United States, and was shown at the Tennessee Bonnaroo festival with The Art of Such N Such. In 'Home Automation' a family of lifesize aluminum animatronic crash test dummies musically self-destruct, as they watch color code threat alerts on their projected home TV. The robot family's heads finally ignite into circuit-breaking flames. [15]
Captured! by Robots is a touring band led by Jay Vance, along with several animatronic bandmates. [16] Vance's music-making robots were created via pneumatic actuation and 3 integrated computer systems. The ultimate goal, Vance states "is to create a live experience that blurs the line between the audience and his hard-rockin', sailor-talkin' automatons". [17]
Since 2002, ArtBots has put on robotic art exhibitions featuring the work of robotics artists from around the world. Participants in each show are selected from responses to an open call for works; works are selected to represent a broad and inclusive cross-section of the tremendous range of creative art and robotics activity.
In 2008, a citywide exhibition of ten large-scale, outdoor robotic artworks called "BigBots" was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The exhibition included work at The Andy Warhol Museum, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Mattress Factory museum of installation art and pieces by Golan Levin, Grisha Coleman, Matt Barton and Jacob Ciocci, Ian Ingram, and Osman Khan. One of the pieces, "Green Roof Roller Coaster," a robotic roller-coaster for plants by Gregory Witt and Joey Hays that let the plants decide when they wanted to go for a ride, remains on the roof of the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh to this day.[ citation needed ]
An exhibition titled "Robotic Art" held at the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in Paris in 2014–2015. Monumental robotic artworks were presented, including Jean Michel Bruyère's Le Chemin de Damastès, a 50 m kinetic sculpture composed by 21 computer-animated hospital-type beds, the Chico MacMurtrie's Totemobile, a fullscale Citroën DS which transformed in a few minutes to an 18-meter-high totem, and two artworks by Shiro Takatani and Christian Partos specially conceived for the 3D Water Matrix, a robotic interface designed to create and display animated and three-dimensional liquid.[ citation needed ]
Le Grand Palais in Paris organised an exhibition ‘’Artists & Robots", featuring artworks created by more than forty artists with help of robots in 2018. [18]
This is an alphabetically ordered list of contemporary robotics artists.
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
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.
Hydraulics is a technology and applied science using engineering, chemistry, and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids. At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid counterpart of pneumatics, which concerns gases. Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on applied engineering using the properties of fluids. In its fluid power applications, hydraulics is used for the generation, control, and transmission of power by the use of pressurized liquids. Hydraulic topics range through some parts of science and most of engineering modules, and cover concepts such as pipe flow, dam design, fluidics and fluid control circuitry. The principles of hydraulics are in use naturally in the human body within the vascular system and erectile tissue.
An automaton is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions. Some automata, such as bellstrikers in mechanical clocks, are designed to give the illusion to the casual observer that they are operating under their own power or will, like a mechanical robot. The term has long been commonly associated with automated puppets that resemble moving humans or animals, built to impress and/or to entertain people.
Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, artisan, artist and mathematician from the Artuqid Dynasty of Jazira in Mesopotamia. He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described 50 mechanical devices, along with instructions on how to construct them. He is credited with the invention of the elephant clock. He has been described as the "father of robotics" and modern day engineering.
Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many traditional disciplines are now integrating digital technologies and, as a result, the lines between traditional works of art and new media works created using computers has been blurred. For instance, an artist may combine traditional painting with algorithm art and other digital techniques. As a result, defining computer art by its end product can thus be difficult. Computer art is bound to change over time since changes in technology and software directly affect what is possible.
Audio-Animatronics is the registered trademark for a form of robotics animation created by Walt Disney Imagineering for shows and attractions at Disney theme parks, and subsequently expanded on and used by other companies. The robots move and make noise, but are usually fixed to whatever supports them. They can sit and stand but usually cannot walk. An Audio-Animatronic is different from an android-type robot in that it uses prerecorded movements and sounds, rather than responding to external stimuli. In 2009, Disney debuted an interactive version of the technology called Autonomatronics, and in 2018, announced aerial stunt figures called Stuntronics.
An animatronic is a mechatronic puppet. They are a modern variant of the automaton and are often used for the portrayal of characters in films, games and in theme park attractions.
Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration fortune; art dealer Heiner Friedrich, Philippa's husband; and Helen Winkler, a Houston art historian. Dia provides support to projects "whose nature or scale would preclude other funding sources."
Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He has been described as a key figure of theatre and opera from the last 50 years.
Trimpin is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle and Tieton, Washington.
Edward Ihnatowicz was a Polish cybernetic art sculptor active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience.
The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Slovakia, was established in 1991 by the American family of the artist Andy Warhol and the Slovak Ministry of Culture. Until 1996, AWMMA was called The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art.
Two exhibitions in 1962 announced Andy Warhol's dramatic entry into the art world. In July, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, he exhibited his now-iconic Campbell's Soup Cans. The work's 32 canvases, each one featuring a different variety of the company's 32 soups, were lined up in a single row on a ledge that wrapped around the gallery. 'Cans sit on shelves,' the gallery director, Irving Blum, later said of the installation. 'Why not?' The paintings marked a breakthrough for Warhol, who had previously worked as a commercial illustrator: they were among his first works based on consumer goods, and among the first to embrace serial repetition. Although he hand-painted each canvas, they were made to seem mechanically produced
The history of robots has its origins in the ancient world. During the industrial revolution, humans developed the structural engineering capability to control electricity so that machines could be powered with small motors. In the early 20th century, the notion of a humanoid machine was developed.
Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world.
Blake Nelson Boyd, commonly known as Blake Boyd, is an American film actor, comedian, and visual artist who lives and works in New Orleans and London. Boyd was mentored by Andres Serrano and Andy Warhol Factory manager Billy Name in the 1990s. Boyd's visual art takes many different forms of expression including painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, video and installation.
Lewis Allen was a British-born director whose credits included classic television series and a diverse range of films. Allen worked mainly in the United States, working on Broadway and directing 18 feature films between 1944 and 1959. From the mid-1950s he moved increasingly into television and worked on a number of the most popular shows of the time in the US.
Magazine and History is a 4.3-meter-high painting by Andy Warhol completed in 1983 and part of the Hubert Burda Media collection.
Virgil Marti is an American visual artist recognized for his installations blending fine art, design, and decor from a range of styles and periods. Marti’s immersive sculptural environments, often evoking nature and the landscape, combine references from high culture with decorative, flamboyant, or psychedelic imagery, materials, and objects of personal significance.
The Andy Warhol Robot is an animatronic robot created by Andy Warhol in 1981, as a self-portrait.