Paul the robot drawing Patrick at tenderpixel gallery, London. Paul the robot is part of Patrick Tresset's exhibition at tenderpixel in central London.
A robotic art installation by Patrick Tresset, sponsored by Tate modern.
From the exhibition at NEO Bankside as part of MERGE Festival, 10th to 21st October 2012.
Sitter: Nino Tchitava, Sound: Steph Horak, Video: Patrick Tresset
Illuminate Productions 2012, supported by Tate Modern, Arts Council England & Better Bankside.
Patrick introduces Paul and discusses arts, robotics, madness and immortality.
Video of the INLOVE installation at the Pompidou center 20/10/2013 - 3/11/2013
Paul-IX le vaniteux, passes time by drawing a still life from observation. The ensemble of objects depicted seems reminiscent of a Vanitas of the XVIth century; a type of motif traditionally depicting objects that symbolise different aspects of the futility of human earthly pursuits.
The irony of an artificial agent commenting upon human behaviours and mortality is counterbalanced by the knowledge that, just as the Nexus-6 in P. K. Dick's "Do androids dream of electric sheep" the Paul series of robots have, a short life expectancy. Anyway, what is the point for such a robot to dedicate its existence to drawings that comments on human existence rather than be a utilitarian slave as expected of it?
The Paul series of robots are artificial agents obsessively focused on the drawing practice. Paul predecessors were originally developed to palliate a debilitating painter’s block and as such can be seen as creative prosthetics or behavioral self-portraits. Even if the way the Pauls draw is based on Tresset's technique, their style is not a pastiche but rather an interpretation influenced by the robots' characteristics.
Paul IX will be exhibited at Goldsmiths, University of London part of the "Creative Machines" exhibition, produced by S. Horak and curated by W. Latham, F. Fol Leymarie and Atau Tanaka.
An old school desk with a sheet of paper pinned onto it. An arm holding a black Bic pen. A camera eye attached to a short wooden pole looks at a small table on which objects are placed to form a still life: a human skull, an empty can of beer, a large shining shell and dried poppy pods.
“La Vanite” is a theatrical installation. A nervous sketching robot stripped down to its bare essentials endlessly draws an updated vanitas. The party is over – the beer is drunk, opium enters the blood vessels and manipulates our neurotransmitters, the voluptuous shell is empty, life is gone. The remnants of ecstasy and trance are traces of former intensity. Life is short. Maybe too short. Maybe the party has been nothing but an attempt to forget, to assimilate life and death. So it is either Roy Beatty's “I want more life, father” or Shakespeare's “Life's but a walking shadow”.
The robot here is a little story machine, it is constructed to build stories about humanness. It is not self-contained but dependent on our gaze. Having a soulless robot meditating on our mortality raises numerous candid, existential and meaningless questions. It is an allegory of what has been called our posthuman condition: man's face finally washed out by the ocean, not recognizable anymore as an important figure of knowledge or merely one of its tropes.
As a posthuman entity, the robot, named Paul-IX, is not just a secondary agent, a mediating medium helping humans to meditate. It acts as if it is an artist in its own right, producing images that are not preprogrammed. Although the way the robot draws is based on Tresset's own technique, its style is not a pastiche but rather an autonomous interpretation influenced by the robot’s qualities and faults. Ironically, that is of course a quite human way to reach eternal life: leaving traces for posterity to see.
Drawing robots!
Video for "5RNP", a project created & developped by Patrick Tresset.
Variation Media Art Fair, Paris 2015.
The two robots are performing live for the "Before the Beginning and After the End" installation, a collaborative artwork by Goshka Macuga and Patrick Tresset. This installation is part of "TO THE SON OF MAN WHO ATE THE SCROLL", Macuga's solo show at the Prada Foundation in Milan.