Two Masters students at Switzerland’s Basel Academy of Art have created a robot capable of painting original artwork. The word “original” floats fairly close to the word “random,” prompting the question: can a robot make art? Maybe the robot is the art. After all, art making art is very meta.
Made up of two aluminum arms and an acrylic box on wheels that’s been laser cut according to original design, the robot is named BNJMN – but pronounced like the name Benjamin, the use of acronym playing with the idea that this little nonliving bot can do something only humans are supposed to. Made from the minds of students Danilo Wanner and Travis Purrington, it’s described as a “mobile sensory image production mechanism,” and it’s programmed with 436 lines of code that tell it to roam in search of paper, paint whatever, and sign the work before beginning the cycle over again.
BNJMN has five servomechanisms for movement and two sensors for art-making. It’s able to move straight ahead or rotate, using the light sensor and the touch sensor to find paper by determining the amount of reflected light gathered.
The two aluminum arms are coded with a program called the Expressive Output Cycle, and are designed with a joint and spring system that allows for control over the pressure of each mark made. BNJMN works remotely with 9V batteries, with an Arduino Uno brain on board along with a remote micro-controller. It also has an on/off switch for resting, something living artists probably wish they had from time to time. Only a robot’s off time is definite.
Animal New York described the robot’s work as “minimal and meditative–a bit like Franz Kline without all the drama.” It moves slowly across the table searching for paper, but once the two arms prepare for brush mode, they spring into action, painting rough jagged lines in red and gray. At the end of the creative cycle, the bot moves down to the corner of the paper and draws a squiggle with a line underneath for a signature.
BNJMN is different from all the art-making robots who came before him in that he’s not coded with a predetermined image to draw. He sketches something different on each piece of paper he finds, and even though the work is still coming from a random set of 0s and 1s, the design itself is still technically autonomous from any sort of human interference.
It’s a funny thing for a robot to do – something without emotion creating in a medium that’s propelled forward by feeling and constantly being driven by the human experience. Little BNJMN knows nothing outside of finding paper and making marks on it – one more way to ponder the question “is it art?”
Even though she creates the likenesses of people, they’re not portraits in any traditional sense. Kumi Yamashita has worked with shadow, alphabet letters, and even shoe prints to render the delicate faces of individuals, using whatever obscure medium she’s working in to highlight every glance, wrinkle and shadow. Her portraits focus on faces and let the rest of the body fade away underneath, each face revealing a perfect, unique composition of nose, eyes, mouth, and cheeks.
Her two newest works were created in opposite ways – the first involves the stripping away of white threads from a single piece of denim, revealing the vertically oriented portrait of a woman who turns to look back at us in “Warp & Weft – Mother #2.” Her second latest work comes from her Constellation series – portraits made from a single unbroken thread that’s been wrapped around a dense forest of galvanized nails. “Constellation – Mana #2” reveals the nail-speckled face of a little Asian girl, her eyes cast down in wonder and her face glowing against a dark background.
“Warp & Weft – Mother #2”
The intricacies of Kumi’s Constellation works can only be fully appreciated in the detail shots that let you see how much intricate detail it takes to capture a likeness with just nails and a single piece of thread. One eye alone takes at least thirty nails, and who knows how many hours to create. According to Kumi’s website each Constellation portrait takes a process lasting many months to create, all the nails piercing through a wooden panel painted solid white.
Detail, “Constellation – Mana #2”
It looks like the little girl is discovering something for the first time, her face glowing and eyebrows arched with interest. In my mind she’s watching Kumi create this very portrait, lips parted in awe as the string is wound rapidly around the nails to create her likeness out of a single black thread.
A Japanese artist living and working in New York City, Kumi Yamashita has been showing her work all over the world since the early 2000s. Her piece “Constellation – Mana” was chosen as a finalist in the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Competition, and will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for almost an entire year, from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014. The competition asks artists to create a portrait from a living person they’ve had direct contact with.
According to Philip Kennicott’s Washington Post article about the competition, “Constellation – Mana” shows an image of Kumi’s niece, someone she described as “chatty, awkward and sometimes obnoxious.” Kennicott writes, “From a distance, the portrait appears to be a photograph that has been slightly altered to give its surface the look of a lightly crackled pottery glaze. Closer inspection reveals the astonishingly complicated method of its production: A single fine string has been wound around hundreds of delicate nails, giving a sense of the missing snapshot through the density of the web it creates.”
Photographs from recent years are given a splash of past – a figure or middle-ground cast in a hauntingly transparent black and white, an image that comes from a photograph of what stood in the exact same spot decades before. Usually this image from the past comes from a time of war, so that the dramatic differences between countries fighting and not fighting can be witnessed in their entirety.
Below sits a photograph of Berlin’s Strasse des siebzehnten Juni taken in 2004. A man casually talks on his phone in the foreground and a car speeds past on the left, but in the center of the image stand two men from 1989, and behind them running through the middle of the scene sits the Berlin Wall, turned gray and translucent by time. A man walks along the wall in the older photograph, his form framed by a crane building in the future.
On the Strasse des siebzehnten Juni, Berlin, 1989/2004
A peaceful scene in New Jersey is interrupted by the giant flaming Hindenburg blimp as it crashes to the ground, its second half already turned to collapsed rubble on the ground. This historical event that happened in 1937 is brought forward in time and crashes over the ground in 2004, as a man in a red coat walks his red dog in the foreground, completely unaware of the past happening behind him.
Lakehurst, New Jersey USA, 1937/2004
The series was created in collaboration with the advertising agency, Ground Zero, as part of a marketing campaign for the History Channel. The campaign also included tv ads in which black and white videos of the Berlin Wall falling are superimposed upon modern, ordinary scenes of people commuting.
The History Channel said the aim of the campaign is to “Motivate people to understand the history of where they live by watching the History Channel.” It’s easy to forget the people who came before us, and probably sat where we sit now and walked where we walk.
The terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1940/2004
Seth Taras is a self-taught American artist, born into a family of artists. He’s been named one of Luerzer’s Archive’s 200 Best Photographers Worldwide. “Know Where You Stand” won Taras a Cannes Lion, and the campaign has now been translated into 30 languages and published in 130 countries.
His website gives more information into how his photographs come to be, reading, “Nearly all pictures are direct prints from original film negatives with no digital alteration and taken largely hand-held.”
Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normany, 1944/2004
For more of Seth Taras’ work, check out his website.
Technical info and featured image via the Creative Applications Network.
