Role for robots that daub, twitch and zing
What is your idea of the perfect robot? Mine would feed the cat, put out the trash and perform all chores while showing unquestioning obedience. This seems fair. After all, the word robot comes from the Czech for 'drudgery'.
Techies, however, appear determined to devise quite the opposite: dangerous cybernetic subversives. Think of those robot war shows in which a spiky mini-go-kart named Knightmare, say, converges on a hammer-wielding baby tank called Gotterdammerung. The adversaries then try to annihilate each other before they are both shovelled into a hole by a studio robot called X-Terminator (or whatever).
The spectacle is entertaining in a drink-beer-and-jeer kind of way but perhaps a touch detrimental to the image of robots in general. Not all are like that. Indeed, many have a sensitive side.
Consider the artbot, that genteel antidote to the thrashing gladiatorial TV antagonist. The word suggests a beret-clad humanoid creakily trying to paint a vase of flowers. In fact, few artbots are programmed to dabble in this kind of activity, with the notable exception of the 'semi-living artist' known as MEART (Multi-Electrode Array Art).
This picture-drawing robot, based at the University of Western Australia in Perth, is controlled by the brain signals of cultured rat cells at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The neurons dictate how the artbot manipulates the three coloured markers it grips.
Sure, the canvases MEART delivers may not be Picasso (in fact, the average image has all the graphic glamour of, well, a dead rat) but in time MEART may raise its game to the level of the performers in probably the most ambitious artbot project to date, LEMUR: the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.
Founded in 2000 by the musician-cum-engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR transcends the boundaries of the conventional orchestra.
Leading LEMUR lights include ShivaBot, a four-armed drumming robot resembling the Hindu god. Then there is GuitarBot, which Mr Singer describes as a 'versatile, responsive, capable electrified slide guitar', and TibetBot, a robotic percussive instrument whose haunting tones are produced by mechanical arms striking three Tibetan singing bowls.
Still more eery is Small Work for Robot and Insects, from the English outfit Host Productions. Here, a robotic insect takes its cue from a choir of actual crickets. It communicates by sensing the chirping of its organic counterparts, then using digital neural network technology to trigger 'actuators' and lights.
The mysterious Stijn Slabbinck's Scratchrobot is an automated turntable DJ that takes its cue not from bugs, but from you, the user. Scratchrobot creates scratch performances based on e-mails it receives. The resulting sound is digitised and zinged back to the 'composer'. I typed the magic words 'fragrant harbour'. The sound, as with all artbot tunes, was interesting.
Beyond music, 50 Drones (by inventor David Bowen) is a jellyfish-like sculpture comprising 50 electric-wheeled vehicles rattling at the end of 3.5-metre power cord tethers, indulging in 'spastic unpredictable behaviour'.
The artbot installation Shootings (after artist Francisco de Goya), by New York-based Han Gene Paik, presents children's dolls 'retrofitted with animatronics'. The Quicktime video shows one of Paik's recruits beheaded and twitching after being shot, while its companion begs a dolly firing squad for mercy.
On second thoughts, artbots are not necessarily quite as upmarket as one would hope. Nevertheless, in the main, they counter the tendency to create robots designed only for mindless violence. Who needs them? We already have humans for that.
