Paintrobot 'Bob Rob'
Can a painting be considered ‘art’ if it is constructed by artificial intelligence and painted by a robot? The performance Paintrobot ‘Bob Rob’ posed this question at a recent German art exhibition. With one of the Applied Labs' Universal Robots, a multidisciplinary team established a system, which is able to use sensory information, calculate a painting and paint it with different colours.
Artificial intelligence is a trending topic and smart robotics could be considered its supreme discipline. After an AI-generated picture has been sold for 430k, the discussion is opened up: Can we consider something as ‘art’,even though humans have only enabled, but not performed the actual artistic process?
The project Paintrobot ‘Bob Rob’ fuelled this discussion at a German art exhibition Kunsttage Sommerhausen and motivate the visitors to think about the disruption digitisation is currently causing in society.
Assistant professor Doris Aschenbrenner and Lecturer Joris van Dam from the Applied Labs (faculty of IDE, TU Delft) worked together with two German companies (Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH and Tokeya Deep Data Dive) in order to develop the installation, which uses image recognition, a flexible 3D printed brush tool and laser-cutted equipment. The paintrobot can be viewed in Applied Labs.
Additional information can be found at the German website paintrobot.de. This is where the source code and the information concerning 3D printing and lasercutting of the equipment are published as well, so that this project can be freely used by other non-commercial organisations.
Doris Aschenbrenner
Joris van Dam
- +31 15 27 86870
- j.j.f.vandam@tudelft.nl
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Room B-0-080
Present on: Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri
“To condense fact from the vapor of nuance” - Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson