Interactive Robotic Painting Machine By Benjamin Grosser (VIDEO)

The technological singularity may not be looming in our immediate future, but artist Benjamin Grosser's 'Interactive Robotic Painting Machine' is undoubtedly pushing it. Machines have already begun their automated takeover by replacing humans in various roles across the globe, but we would hope that our monopoly on creativity would last for at least another couple hundred years. Alas, Grosser may have unknowingly birthed the apocalypse with his Painting Machine.

The machine uses artificial intelligence to make its own decisions through the course of its painting, yet there is an impressive interactive element as well. Much like an artist being influenced by music playing in the studio, the machine comes complete with a microphone and mixer that it uses as an input in its decision-making. In the absence of external noise, the machine listens to its own gears working as inspiration, creating a sort of an internal dialogue. Grosser has since experimented with composers and live musicians to alter the machine's finished product.

It doesn't quite create masterpieces yet, but the results are impressive nonetheless; the machine may be a step forward for artificial creativity, but just as a child may struggle to color inside the lines, Grosser's device will be hard-pressed to paint outside them.

View the video below and follow up on Grosser's ongoing artistic experiments here.

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.

Comments

[Cleo Creech]

01:39 PM on 09/22/2011

Didn't Shirley MacClaine and Paul Newman do the music driven painting machine better in "What a Way to Go". Well that is until they turned on him and painted him to death.

[DocJoseph]

12:25 PM on 09/21/2011

Painters sometimes begin with a visual image or mental impression of a visual scene, or patterns of some sort. I see a computer, scanner and dot matrix printer as a robotic painting machine.

Maybe not "imaginative" enough for some, but when you start to run out of colors, it can come close to Andy Warhol's works.

[mateoconifer]

06:48 AM on 09/21/2011

While painting by numbers is nothing new and one man's paint brush is a processor, not much from either here.

[Bucket-Of-Love]

10:19 PM on 09/20/2011

"Much like an artist being influenced by music playing in the studio, the machine comes complete with a microphone and mixer that it uses as an input in its decision-making."
.

No, I don't think so. Big difference between the two. Besides, this sort of thing has been done before in various ways. It's more art student (the artist is working towards an MFA) bs and theatrics. And, *once again*, Huffington publishes it as if it's meaningful.

[Troy Lynch]

09:27 PM on 09/20/2011

What is meant by "decision making"? It seems as if the machine is only going through a series of preprogrammed responses to the sounds picked-up by the mic.