Skip to main content

Week 3: Robotics+Art

Gutenberg's Printing Press
In week 3’s lecture, Vesna discussed how the industrial revolution changed the process of production and the types of innovations created. Mass production became the main mode of production, shifting from hand crafted artwork that required much skill to an assembly line of simplified jobs that made a day’s work much more efficient. It seems as if the industrial revolution altered metal work and inventions from intricate works of art to mass productions of technology. I initially never considered the printing press as a work of art, but after this lesson, I now understand more clearly that technology and robotics is just a form of mechanical art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mLmHUbC240
What really surprised me was that the invention of what we know in the modern culture as robots was actually created for theater. Just as Benjamin and Douglass considered that every type of art can be reproduced mechanically, robots are just that. They have been replicated in digital forms, such as in the movie Robocop, and have changed the meaning of art and its connotations of how we perceive robotics in our modern society. Technology has had to adapt to the ever-changing strides we make in science, and with that, so has the way inventors create their new concepts and complex, mechanical forms of art.

Now, with technology becoming more sophisticated, robots are becoming more and more human-like. Just as Descartes and other philosophers discussed, the distinction between human and robot will become blurred and it will be hard to differentiate between the two. Although no robot has yet to crack the Turing Test, a test of an artificial intelligent being to think and behave as a human, everyday robots are getting closer to being able to think like humans.





Sources:

Vesna, Victoria. “Robotics + Art.” Lecture 3.

Quiah, Priscilla. “Disruptive Innovation.” N.p., n.d. Web. 2015.
<http://cronkitehhh.jmc.asu.edu/blog/2015/04/disruptive-innovation/>

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" from Illuminations. New York, Schocken Books, 1968, Pgs. 217-251

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 381–386. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1576221.

Reingold, Eyal. "The Turing Test." N.p., n.d. Web. 1999.
<http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/ai.html>





Comments

  1. brontehalliganApril 23, 2018 at 7:05 PM

    Lia, I really liked your discussion of robotics and theatre. The digital forms of technology has adapted to the world today, and like you said I do believe we are taking strides within science and the technological world, to try and keep up with our consumer identities that we have today. Great post! I enjoyed it

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 23, 2018 at 10:36 PM

    I found your post really interesting, I think it is really crazy to think that robots are getting closer to thinking like humans in the near future. However, it is somewhat scary to me, I am scared of robots.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousApril 24, 2018 at 7:48 PM

    I loved how you brought up the overlap between human and robots. I think the idea of creating some artificial being that can simulate the human behavior and emotion is an intrinsically artistic approach toward the nuts and bolts of the modern technology.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownApril 25, 2018 at 5:46 PM

    It's interesting how you talk about machines being artistic in their own way. I feel like there are a lot of machines that have had to not only operate well be aesthetically appealing. Prime examples would be cars and phones which we buy just as much for performance as appearance.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 7: Neuroscience + Art

This week’s topic was by far the most interesting topic so far because the brain is a field of science that is very unexplored even though our brains and our consciousness makes up who we are. One idea I thought was interesting was the art project FMRI by Suzanne Anker and Giovanni. They superimposed butterfly wings onto 15 different MRI brain scans, and even though the butterfly wings were identical on all scans, the differences in the brain images made each picture look different. I thought this was interesting because just like how no two people are alike, every brain is completely different too even when the same thing is done to each one of them. Another thing I found to be interesting was the discussion between Freud and Young about dreams and discussion of how the conscious and unconscious function. Although Freud argues that the unconscious is simply “a reservoir of repressed thoughts and motivations,” I agree with Young’s idea that the unconscious is actually...
Post a Comment
Read more

Event 2

In tonight’s LASER event, I listened to five artists/scientists talk about the integration between art and technology in their lives, research, and in history. The presentations I found to be most interesting were by Robert Raffeatá, Maru García, and Ariel Levi Simmons. Raffeatá's culture community In Raffeatá’s work, she studies how culture interacts with how people think about their health. She discussed how our body is more microbe than human, in fact 90% of our body’s composition comes from microbes. I thought her presentation was interesting because she combined medicinal science to art and more abstract concepts of how humanity interprets and interacts with nature which creates the environment, a variable that she claims must be included i n the study of microbiology. Her ideas of how our health is a community was something I never heard before and to me further proved the point that medicine and art are very closely related like we learned in week 4. She also...
Post a Comment
Read more

Event 1

Tonight I went to an event called "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick" at the LACMA. This event was a presentation about the 2001 science-fiction movie Space Odyssey and the origins of the idea, creation, and audience's reaction to the film when it premiered. Michael Benson, an author and artist who recently published a book about the creation of this film, discussed specific shots in the movie, such as a repetitive scene where the Jupiter-bound astronauts run on an artificial gravity centrifuge and how the perspective of the shot smoothly transitions from halfway up the wall to on the floor, which was a phenomenal and, according to the audience, boring segment of the film. This segment of the discussion reminded me of lecture 2 in week 2's topic of math in art. Because the perspective of the shot changed, it caused me to recall the golden ratio rule and made me wonder what t This event was pretty much exactly what this course's topic is about: technology and art. I...
Post a Comment
Read more