Watch robot artists in a robot classroom draw surprisingly beautiful portraits of people as part of artist Patrick Tresset’s latest exhibition. Via Wired:
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.
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.