Week 3: Robotics+Art

When I hear the word “Robot”, the first image that comes into my mind is a metallic body with monotone voice saying “Hi, my friend, what can I do for you?” But after listening to this lecture, I found that this word really means mechanization, industrialization and mass production.

Obviously, technology plays an important role in all kinds of artwork, such as literature, paintings and movies. The artwork will always shows the trendiest products of scientific development and reflects on where the inventions will lead us. My favorite scientific fiction film is I, Robot by Will Smith. The movie shows a strong belief that the robots can achieve self-evolution by using machine learning and can even possess emotions and dreams just like human. At the end of the movie, I was surprised to find out the protagonist, who hates robots, is a robot himself and he never realizes that. It was shot in 2004, and 12 years later, the artificial intelligence starts to shock the world. Just several weeks ago, the Google artificial intelligence, AlphaGo, beat lee Se-dol, a Go world champion, in Go, which was thought as a very complicated game that can only be mastered by human beings.

But, of course, every coin has two sides. The mechanization and mass production did a great job in making art accessible to the general public. We can now stay at home and see all those famous artwork online. If we have further interest, we can buy copies of Van Gogh, Picasso, or Monet’s pieces and hang them on the wall. Also, the technology now allows people from different places to communicate and even work on one piece of work. Just like Douglas Davis stated in his article, “There is here”. However, when we appreciate the beauty of all the copies of artwork, we feel there is something missing. In Walter Benjamin’s article, “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he argues that the reproduction lacks in its presence in time and space, it’s not original anymore. For example, there is a very special kind of china that its glazes in different colors mix, blend and have chemical reactions during the production process. Since this situation occurs very rarely, people view this kind of china with very high artistic value. But now workers master the technique to produce the “mysterious” glaze, they can decide which color and what kind of pattern according to people’s tastes, the china is not unique anymore, and it losses its identity.

normal china

china that has changing glaze

From industrialization, we can see that the relationship between art and science has become closer and closer, but when we try to work with both of them, we should not forget the initial determination that both art and science are creative and we want to make innovations.

sources:

Alamy. "I, Robot (2004)-The Best Robots in Film". The Telegraph. Web. Apr 15, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10943616/robots-in-film.html?frame=2963515

"AlphaGo-the first computer program to ever beat a professional player at the 

game of go". Google Deepmind. 2016. Web. Apr 15, 2016. https://deepmind.com/alpha-go

kongfz.com. Web. Apr 14, 2016. http://book.kongfz.com/item_pic_105897_263033767/?ref=baidu

"What is Porcelain?". wiseGEEK. Web. Apr 15, 2016. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-porcelain.htm

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” The MIT Press, 1995. Print. Apr 16, 2016.

Rodney Brooks. "Robots will invade our lives". TED. Feb, 2003. Web. Apr 16, 2016. http://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_on_robots