Art Lessons from Robots

Mr. Springs (robot, built 2008)

Acrylic paint dries in a matter of hours
Especially the cheap generic kind you bought
Nothing comes of putting down globs of primary colors

Straight out of the bottle
Onto a pre-stretched, pre-primed canvas
And hoping the robot mixes them well

Colors must be coaxed gently through hue and tone
Never applied unmixed
And all rough materials must be selected and prepared
With time and care
(Well, most of this came from the visibly distraught
Squeak and Katherine during my formal critiques)

But the sound he made, like snoring, was sweet
And everyone liked the way his box body twitched from the servos



Nila (robot, built 2008) 

Colors mix unpredictably
Linseed oil retards drying

and spatters
and is hard to clean

Mineral spirits seep through layers and canvas
Plain Ivory soap is good for getting paint out of things
Act on it quickly
Light is a noisy signal,
but slow to change in an empty room
A light sensor left in the dark will see random noise
And Nila alone in the dark,

jittering around the still-wet paint from the day,
and the days before, smearing the information together,
sort of seems to be dreaming

Calculina (AI, built by Tom Lippincott 2010)

Random strokes coupled with a simple feedback mechanism will converge on a desirable result