ROBOTS

The Robots painting series was originally developed for the Portrait-Robot exhibition at the Maison d’Ailleurs at Yverdon in Switzerland.
For the space I had in the exhibition I imagined a fictional narrative where humans, hoping to prevent a robotic uprising, encourage machines to emancipate themselves through art and the development of their own culture. I envisioned a classic “portrait gallery” akin to the one in London. In the context of robot culture, however, the lines between reality and fiction blur. The gallery featured drawings of historically significant robots from both cinema and actual scientific research, alongside portraits of influential humans. Since, robot portraits have regularly featured in my practice
In the end, only the drawings from this project were exhibited. This series featured figures such as Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Isaac Asimov, Astroboy, Wall-e, amongst others and several pieces were subsequently acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.
For reasons I can no longer recall, the paintings were left out of the exhibition.

Pinocchio,. 2014
Acrylic on canvas
25 x 30 cm

Nao, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
25 x 30 cm

C3PO, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
25 x 30 cm

Pinocchio,. 2014
Acrylic on canvas
25 x 30 cm

Studio view

Goldorak, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
25 x 30 cm

TECHNIQUE

These paintings were produced at Konstanz university during a residency. The technique and system used are described in the research paper “Artistically Skilled Embodied Agents” published in the proceedings of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) conference, London, 2014. They were produced with a succession of multiple layers of impasto painted by the robot influenced by a feedback loop, and uniform glazes applied by me.