An introduction to
robotic art in twenty installations and performances. The catalogue includes a brief history of the artist and the robot's relationship by Austrian curator Gottfried Hattinger.
When artists use robotics it is not so much to design robots as to transform the natural world. Giving pride of place to impressive and sometimes monumental works of art, like the twenty installations and performances featured in this catalogue, they strive to dissolve the boundaries between art and
science.
Take Chico MacMurtrie / ARW's
Totemobile, which looks like a well-known make of car but is actually a sculpture concealing fifty interdependent machines that unfolds to form an 18-meter-high organic totem made of metal and inflatable components.
Or consider the work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, like
Animaris Adulari,
Animaris Umerus and
Animaris Ordis, three of his autonomous giant beach creatures that resemble mammoth skeletons and are impelled by wind. According to their creator, “the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”
Besides the course of the exhibition, the catalog includes a panorama on the mechanical and humanoids creatures, unpublished in English, “Artist and robot: A brief history of a relationship” by Gottfried Hattinger, former artistic director of the Ars electronica festival at the Brucknerhaus in Linz (Austria).
Works by Jean-Michel Bruyère / LFKs, Shun Ito, Theo Jansen, Lu Yang, Chico MacMurtrie / ARW, Maywa Denki, Till Nowak, Christian Partos, Robotlab, Shiro Takatani, Troika.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, Paris, from April 8, 2014, to January 4, 2015.
