Robotic art is any artwork that employs some form of

robot 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 c ...

ic or automated technology. There are many branches of robotic art, one of which is robotic installation art, a type of

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...

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.

History

Early examples of robotic art and theater existed in ancient China as far back as the

Han dynasty The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...

(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. By the time of the

Sui dynasty The Sui dynasty (, ) was a short-lived imperial dynasty of China that lasted from 581 to 618. The Sui unified the Northern and Southern dynasties, thus ending the long period of division following the fall of the Western Jin dynasty, and layi ...

(sixth century AD), a compendium was written called the ''Shai Shih t'u Ching'', or "Book of Hydraulic Excellencies". There are reports that the

T'ang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingd ...

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 Hero of Alexandria (; grc-gre, Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς, ''Heron ho Alexandreus'', also known as Heron of Alexandria ; 60 AD) was a Greece, Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egy ...

(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 The Labours of Hercules or Labours of Heracles ( grc-gre, οἱ Ἡρακλέους ἆθλοι, ) are a series of episodes concerning a penance carried out by Heracles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, whose name was later romanised as ...

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 clock A water clock or clepsydra (; ; ) is a timepiece by which time is measured by the regulated flow of liquid into (inflow type) or out from (outflow type) a vessel, and where the amount is then measured. Water clocks are one of the oldest time-m ...

s and other hydraulic mechanisms. 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 Villard de Honnecourt (''Wilars dehonecort'', ''Vilars de Honecourt'') was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio or "sketchbook" containing about 250 drawings and designs ...

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 Old Town Square ( cs, Staroměstské náměstí or colloquially ) is a historic square in the Old Town quarter of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. It is located between Wenceslas Square and Charles Bridge. Buildings The square fe ...

, features four

animatronic Animatronics refers to mechatronic puppets. They are a modern variant of the automaton and are often used for the portrayal of characters in films and in theme park attractions. It is a multidisciplinary field integrating puppetry, anatomy a ...

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. In the 15th-16th century,

Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, Drawing, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially res ...

invented several theatrical automata, including a lion which walked onstage and delivered flowers from its breast, and a moving suit of armour. The magician

Isaac Fawkes Isaac Fawkes (1675?–1732) (also spelt Fawks, Fawxs, Fauks and Faux) was an English conjurer and showman. The first record of Fawkes was an appearance by his son at Southwark Fair in 1722, but an advertisement of April of the same year boast ...

, 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 Pierre Jaquet-Droz (; 1721–1790) was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He was born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Principality of Neuchâtel, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He lived in Paris, London, and ...

made some highly sophisticated automotas, including "The Writer" (made of 6,000 pieces), "The Musician" (2,500 pieces) and "The Draughtsman" (2,000 pieces). These devices are mechanical

analog computer An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities (''analog signals'') to model the problem being solved. In c ...

s and can still be seen in working condition at the Art and History Museum in

Neuchâtel , neighboring_municipalities= Auvernier, Boudry, Chabrey (VD), Colombier, Cressier, Cudrefin (VD), Delley-Portalban (FR), Enges, Fenin-Vilars-Saules, Hauterive, Saint-Blaise, Savagnier , twintowns = Aarau (Switzerland), Besançon (France), ...

, Switzerland. Also surviving to this day is a mechanical theatre that was constructed in the gardens of Hellbrun (near

Salzburg Salzburg (, ; literally "Salt-Castle"; bar, Soizbuag, label=Bavarian language, Austro-Bavarian) is the List of cities and towns in Austria, fourth-largest city in Austria. In 2020, it had a population of 156,872. The town is on the site of the ...

), 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. 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 New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. 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. In 1898, the physicist and engineer

Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesla ( ; ,"Tesla"
''

remote-controlled In electronics, a remote control (also known as a remote or clicker) is an electronic device used to operate another device from a distance, usually wirelessly. In consumer electronics, a remote control can be used to operate devices such as ...

boat in

Madison Square Garden Madison Square Garden, colloquially known as The Garden or by its initials MSG, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City. It is located in Midtown Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth avenues from 31st to 33rd Street, above Pennsylva ...

, 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. Robotics have now become a mode of expression for artists confronting fundamental issues and contradictions in our advanced industrial culture.

Performance art

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 Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as Métamatics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art ...

(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 and 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 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, New York, where it dramatically caught fire and self-destructed before a crowd of onlookers. Due in part to the many variables and complications associated with the production of performances of this kind, they have historically been just as likely to be "underground" affairs as officially sanctioned events. San Francisco's Survival Research Laboratories is considered to be the pioneer of the "spectacle" form of underground robotic art. Two San Francisco-based performance ensembles, Frank Garvey's " Omnicircus" and Chico MacMurtrie's "Amorphic Robot Works", were among the first expressions of integrated robotic music-theatrical performance, with human actors, dancers and musicians joining the mechanical performers. The robotic ensemble of the "OmniCircus" is a robot red-light district, a life-sized troupe of mechanical beggars, hookers, junkies and street-preachers who appear in OmniCircus stage shows and movies and engage in cyborg guerilla theater on the city streets. The San Francisco Bay Area has been the home and/or origin of many other mechanical performance ensembles and artists, including Ken Rinaldo's large scale robotic art installations, Matt Heckert's Mechanical Sound Orchestra, Kal Spelletich ‘s Seemen, Carl Pisaturo, and Alan Rath, making the SF Bay Area a nexus of robotic art. 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 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Robotics Institute The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014 article in ''Robotics Business Review'' magazine calls it "the world's best robo ...

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. The German artist group RobotLab works with industrial

KUKA KUKA is a German manufacturer of industrial robots and systems for factory automation. It has been predominantly owned by the Chinese company Midea Group since 2016. The KUKA Robotics Corporation has 25 subsidiaries, mostly sales and servi ...

robots in public spaces. It explores the relationship between machine and human by means of installations and performances. One of the group's installations is "Juke Bots", in which two robot arms create music by manipulating records on a turntable. Captured! by Robots is a touring band led by Jay Vance, along with several animatronic bandmates. 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".

Robotic art exhibitions

Since 2002,

ArtBots ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show is an international robot talent show held in New York City and other cities. It is sponsored by a variety of arts organizations, produced by an army of volunteers, and is directed and curated by dorkbot founder, and ...

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 2004, the European Capital of Culture Lille 2004 presented ''Robots!'', an exhibition featuring a multitude of robots, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, phytomorphs, or amorphs from international artists such as

Chico MacMurtrie Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961. He has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Interdisciplinary Artists. In 1990 he received the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. In 1992 MacMurtrie formed ...

Dead Chickens
with their robotic monsters,

Theo Jansen Theodorus Gerardus Jozef Jansen (; born 14 March 1948) is a Dutch artist. In 1990, he began building large mechanisms out of PVC that are able to move on their own and, collectively, are titled ''Strandbeest''. The kinetic sculptures appear to ...

and his giant powered by wind sculptures, as well as robots from various researchers working at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) and at the Humanoid Robotics Institute of

Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...

in Tokyo. 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 Andy Warhol Museum is located on the North Shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archive ...

, the

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PCA) is a non-profit community arts campus that offers arts education programs and contemporary art exhibitions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It also provides services and resources for artists th ...

, the

Carnegie Museum of Art The Carnegie Museum of Art, is an art museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was at what is now the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsbur ...

, and the

Mattress Factory The Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a pioneer of site-specific installation art and features permanent installations by artists Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and Greer Lankton. The museum' ...

museum of installation art and pieces by Golan Levin, Grisha Coleman, Matt Barton and

Jacob Ciocci Jacob Ciocci (born 1977) is an American visual artist, performance artist, musician, and professor. Along with sister Jessica Ciocci and friend Ben Jones, he was one of the three founding members of Paper Rad, an artist collective active from 2000 ...

, 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. An exhibition titled "Robotic Art" held at the

Cité des sciences et de l'industrie The Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie ("City of Science and Industry", abbreviated la CSI) or simply CSI is the biggest science museum in Europe. Located in the Parc de la Villette in Paris, France, it is one of the three dozen French Cultur ...

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

's ''Totemobile'', a fullscale Citroën DS which transformed in a few minutes to an 18-meter-high totem, and two artworks by

Shiro Takatani is a Japanese artist. He currently lives and works in Kyoto. Co-founder and visual creator of the group Dumb Type since 1984, he also became artistic director of the group from 1995 and also started an active solo career in 1998. Biography ...

and Christian Partos specially conceived for the 3D Water Matrix, a robotic interface designed to create and display animated and three-dimensional liquid. Le Grand Palais in Paris organised an exhibition ‘’Artists & Robots", featuring artworks created by more than forty artists with help of robots in 2018. Also, in 2018, the first Robotic Art exhibit was presented at a major robotics research conference acknowledging the increasing influence of robotic art on the technical developments of robotics. A fully curated exhibition of eight robotic artworks by prominent artists and roboticists was later presented in the 2019 edition of the same

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

ICRA conference

Robotics artists

This is a list of contemporary robotics artists. * Max Dean * Maywa Denki *

Ken Feingold Kenneth Feingold (born 1952 in USA) is a contemporary American artist based in New York City. He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installations since 1974. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship ...

Flaming Lotus Girls Flaming Lotus Girls is a volunteer-based group of artists who make large-scale kinetic fire art. FLG has been described as a "women-focused anarchist art collective." The group began in 2000, in San Francisco, California, as a group of six women an ...

*Arthur Ganson *Frank Garvey & Omnicircus * Ken Goldberg *

Genco Gulan Genco Gulan ( (born 1969 in Turkey) is a contemporary conceptual artist and theorist, who lives and works in Istanbul. His transmedia contextual work involves painting, found objects, new media, drawings, sculpture, photography, performance and ...

* Nemo Gould *

Garnet Hertz Garnet Hertz (born 1973) is a Canadian artist, designer and academic. Hertz is Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Art and is known for his electronic artworks and for his research in the areas of ''critical making'' and DIY culture. Work ...

* Ian Ingram * Shun Ito *

Leonel Moura Leonel Moura (born December 26, 1948 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a conceptual artist whose work shifted in the late 1990s from photo based work to Artificial Intelligence and Robotic art. Since then he has produced several Painting Robots and the Robot ...

* Zaven Paré *

Mark Pauline Mark Pauline (born December 14, 1953) is an American performance artist and inventor, best known as founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories. He is a 1977 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Pauline founded SR ...

* Kal Spelletich & Survival Research Laboratories * Eric Paulos * Simon Penny *

Ken Rinaldo Kenneth E. Rinaldo (born 1958) is an American neo-conceptual artist and arts educator, known for his interactive robotics, 3D animation, and BioArt installations. His works include Autopoiesis (2000), and Augmented Fish Reality (2004), a fish-dr ...

Christian Ristow Christian Ristow (born July 2, 1970) is an American robotic artist. He is known for his robotic performance art under the name Robochrist Industries, his animatronics work in film and television, and his large-scale interactive sculptures. Life a ...

Stelarc Stelarc (born Στέλιος Αρκαδίου ''Stelios Arcadiou'' in Limassol in 1946; legally changed his name in 1972) is a Cyprus-born Australian performance artist raised in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, whose works focus heavily on ...

* Pindar Van ArmanCaren, Allie (6 December 2015)
"You Can Give a Robot a Paintbrush, but does it Create Art?"
''NPR''. Retrieved 25 October 2017. * Jeff Weber * Norman White

References

External links

* Kac, Eduardo (15 April 2006)
"Robotic Art Chronology"
NeMe. * Official website of the firs
International Workshop on Robotics and Art
at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - ICRA2011 {{DEFAULTSORT:Robotic Art Visual arts media