Robot sculpture, coming to a gallery near you
By ARTEX Artist
A robot sculpts a recreation of the Ancient Greek work Laocoon and his Sons, which was exhibited in Linz last year. Ars Electronica/Flickr , CC BY-NC-ND Two weeks ago, in an industrial shed in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, a team of engineers installed a large, orange robot arm. It was a standard industrial robot arm, but it was not going to be used for standard purposes. The robot’s job would be to carve moulds for the casting of large-scale, metal sculptures. It is being installed by Urban Art Projects , a company that specializes in the manufacture of sculpture and custom architectural facades. Sculpture might not be the first thing that springs to mind if someone mentions robotics. We hear again and again that robots are set to change the way we drive our cars , grow our food , and perform surgery . But robots are changing art too. There is, in fact, an extremely long history of robots being used in the arts. [The creation](/orgs/codame/projects/the-creation) of automata, mechanical devices driven by cogs, goes back centuries. These “robots” found their greatest expression in the incredible feats of mechanized Karakuri puppets in Japan and the clockwork automata of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The arts actually invented the name “robot”. The first use of the word recorded anywhere in the world was from a 1920 Czech play that featured humanoid style automatons, played by human actors. In the mid-20th century, “cybernetic artists” began to work with electronic robots. Often these were produced as art objects themselves, similar to the older tradition of automatons. The polish artist Edward Ihnatowicz created The Senster , an electromechanical sculpture that could move and respond to people around it in a surprisingly lifelike manner. Cybernetic sculptor Edward Ihnatowicz built the Senster — a 15 ft long, hydraulic robot — for Philips. It was on permanent display at the Evoluon, in Eindhoven in 1970. Fast forwarding to our present moment, the Italian artist Quayola last year exhibited a reproduction of an ancient Greek sculpture , Laocoon and his Sons , which had been carved from polystyrene by a robot. The robot was deliberately instructed to leave the sculpture unfinished.