Week 3 - Robotics + Art

 Artistic innovation continues to expand and develop alongside technological advances. As Professor Vesna showcases through innovations such as the music color machine by Gordon Pask, if there is room to innovate and amplify creative work through technology, it seems only natural that the latest technology be used within art in the same way technology is used to advance any other industry.

Steenson, Molly. A Network of Constant Interactions and Communications, https://www.girlwonder.com/2010/09/a-network-of-constant-interactions-and-communications.html.

Artificial intelligence has advanced leaps and bounds and now has the same creative output as any other human, but the only difference is that it can create within seconds. It can take strands of text, however simple or complicated, and create a digital manifestation using "computational methods that can predict aesthetic judgments in a similar manner as humans" (Cetinic). AI has made the creation of art much more seamless and instantaneous, which too some can be interpreted as harmful while others may view it as innovative.

Allen, Jason. Théâtre D’Opéra Spatial. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html.

 Walter Benjamin gives an interesting perspective on the influence technology holds over art. He views the mechanical manufacturing of art as a depreciated form of the original that cannot encapsulate the arts "presence in time and space" and the uniqueness that coincides with such aspects. Benjamin also mentions how the artistic value of art is lost through replication and how "quantity has been transmuted into quality". On the other hand, inventions such as the printing press are celebrated due to the impact they have had on information accessibility within differing socioeconomic classes and the improvements they have led to in the rate of information exchange. (Lesger).

Robotics within art can be seen in a variety of ways and does not always have to be digital. Artists such as Gijs Van Bon use the more mechanical aspects of robotics to create more tangible displays of art. Van Bon uses robotics to create light displays, as seen in the piece Drop of Light, where fluorescent liquid laser lights are used to create an "orchestra of three-dimensional shapes" that bring a much more ethereal feeling to art than one would normally expect (Van Bon).

Van Bon, Gijs. Drop of Light. http://www.gijsvanbon.nl/drop-of-light.html.

Citations 

Vesna, Victoria. “Industrialization, Robotics, Kinetic and Robotic Art Part 3.” 


Eva Cetinic and James She. 2022. Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 18, 2, Article 66 (May 2022), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3475799


Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Schocken Books, 1969. web.mit.edu, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf. Accessed 21 April 2023


Lesger, C. (2008). The printing press and the rise of the Amsterdam information exchange around 1600. In S. Akita (Ed.), Creating global history from Asian perspectives : proceedings of Global History Workshop: Cross-regional chains in global history: Europe-Asia interface through commodity and information flows (pp. 87-102). Osaka University.

“Drop of Light.” Gijs Van Bon, http://www.gijsvanbon.nl/drop-of-light.html. 


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