Leonel Moura
“BeBot” is a swarm of robots built for the Astana Expo2017. They were made robust and smart as they will perform continuously for 3 months. Each robot detects its own color (blue, red or green) and reacts to it. To start the process they make some initial lines if color is not found for a certain period of time. This means that when the canvas starts to be filled with color the random behavior stops. In such a fashion small groups of robots from 4 to 9 can generate unique paintings based on emergent behavior and stigmergy.
These paintings were performed by the BeBot robots collective during the “Artists and Robots” exhibition organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais
The Astana Paintings demonstrates that creativity, a mechanism similar to intelligence, can be introduced in machines.
Creativity is a natural phenomenon based on simple rules and interactions that can be converted in machine language and behaviour.
Its application in art represents the emergence of a New Kind of Art.
Art created by machines are not a threat to human creativity but rather a challenge and a stimulus for human artists to evolve.
Artificial Creativity is the inevitable future of Art but also of Artificial Intelligence evolution.
BIO
Leonel Moura (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 Robotarium, a zoo for robots. RAP (Robotic Action Painter) (2006) is a robot that makes drawings based on emergence and stigmergy, decides when the work is ready, and signs it, is displayed as a permanent installation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Other works include interactive installations, swarm paintings and sculptures and the adaptation of the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) from Karel Capek, with 3 robots performing aside 3 human actors, premiered in São Paulo in 2010. He is the author of several books dedicated to Art and Science. Leonel Moura has been appointed European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation in 2009.
“Leonel Moura’s work is in line with drawing machines like Jean Tinguely’s Metamatics, from the 1950’s, Aaron de Harold Cohen’s computer program, initiated in 1973, and Roman Verostko’s Derivation of the Laws, from 1990. What distinguishes BeBot from the forementioned works is that it consists in autonomous robots which collectively respond to each other and to its environment to generate emerging complexity, a fundamental principle in scientific research in artificial life and sintetic biology.”
Edward A. Shanken in Flash Art, 316, September/October 2017
