Week 3 Robotics + Art

I was 10 years old when my father took me to accompany him on a business trip to Amsterdam. He was an agent for a discount cloth retailer called Zeeman, and he arranged for me to get a tour of their super-advanced warehouse. The man showing me around spoke of a robot that automatically sorted and arranged a large number of boxes. I was very excited imagined seeing something like the image below but all I saw was a machine that looked like a crane. My perception of robotics was entirely shaped by art and science fiction.

My perception of a robot

Art and robotics have more in common than you may think. The famous Matrix trilogy illustrates Descarte’s famous mind and body problem. Descartes says that we cannot be sure that we are our bodies and we are physically present in a particular place. The Matrix portrays a world in which robots are in control of humans who are actually living in a simulation but they do not know that they are actually sleeping in a machine. The movie is a great combination philosophy and artificial intelligence depicted artistically through a movie.

In the Matrix since birth, humans are controlled by robots

A living example of an individual who embraces robotics and art is Dr. Mari Velonaki, who is an artist and Director of the Creative Robotics Lab at the University of New South Wales. She makes artistic statues like Diamandini that can walk and interact with humans. People perceived the statues as having “ a will of their own.”

Brooks, Katherine. "If The Future Of Art Is Robotics, At Least It Will Be Adorable." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/14/robo-faber_n_4269146.html>.

Descartes, Rene. "Meditation 1 by Rene Descartes." Meditation 1 by Rene Descartes. University of Oregon, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/Meditation1.html>.

"Diamandini Robotic Statue by Mari Velonaki." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=BMqS3AeCCTU>.

Lim, Angelica. "What Roboticists Can Learn From Art, and What Artists Can Learn From Robots." IEEE Spectrum, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/what-roboticists-can-learn-from-art>.

"The Matrix Trilogy." SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://www.sparknotes.com/film/matrix/section1.rhtml>.