In a specially-designed classroom near Southwark station in London, 20 robot students are hard at work. They chat to each other in a language inspired by morse code before their robot teacher settles them down and starts to take the register. Once all robots are accounted for, the day’s lessons begin; the robots dutifully learn to count by drawing straight lines and tally marks in their notebooks.
The robot classroom is part of artist Patrick Tresset’s latest exhibition, Machine Studies. Tresset’s robots consist of a camera and a robot arm holding a pen, controlled by a laptop hidden in each robot’s “body” – a traditional school desk. In Human Study #4, the robot class completes a range of activities partly inspired by Tresset’s own schooldays in France.
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While the robot students’ actions are synchronised, each is unique in its movements. Tresset has programmed the robots to express different behavioural traits, like nervousness or shyness. Some of the robots appear to take to their task with vigour while others work slower and seem apprehensive. Tresset is interested in how we humanise robots; his work, he says, is more about human nature than technology.
In another of his works, Human Study #1 3RNP, three robots wait, pen poised, to draw portraits of human sitters. Over 30 minutes, they raise their camera “heads” to take in their subject and sketch frantically, stopping every few minutes to check the composition. Tresset programmed the robots to roughly emulate his own drawing style, but each has slightly different settings and Tresset says he can’t predict what their portraits will look like. “I am always surprised, I am never sure what they’re going to do,” he tells WIRED.
The exhibition is part of MERGE Festival on London’s Bankside district. The point of the festival is to take art outside of museums and into new contexts within a community, says Donald Hyslop, head of community partnerships at the Tate Modern and chair of Better Bankside. “You don’t need to go to Berlin or Lisbon to find interesting industrial spaces; in this part of London in Bankside, there are many hidden spaces,” he says. Tresset’s work is on display at Platform Southwark.
Angie Dixon, project and production manager at Illuminate Productions, which curates the festival, says people are always keen to have their portrait drawn by Tresset’s robots. “I think people are intrigued by the robots,” she says. “Maybe it’s to do with the fact they want to see if it will fail, or if it can do any better than a human being.”
She had her portrait drawn by an earlier version of the robots in 2012. “At the time, I think they couldn’t distinguish dark skin, so mine was a sort of scratching on the paper,” she says. “But I wasn’t disappointed - I think it was a really interesting experience.”
Tresset does not think robots pose a risk to human artists just yet. Although his robots sign their own work, he considers himself to be the author. He is currently interested in machine learning, and says he would one day like his robots to develop their own style.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
