The Independent on 23 January featured an article on The London Art Fair's French artist/scientist Paul Tresset. His robotic arm (made at a cost of some £300) produces portraits of people by scanning them and translating them into portraits. The robot arms swivels and creates a arty looking, attractive likeness of the person it scans ("the sitter").
This re-opens a debate that has simmered ever since the invention of the camera: if a machine can reproduce a likeness why bother with art and individual artists? The difference here is that the end result of the robot Rubens' efforts has the erratic creative lines that we associate with creativity. But it is actually the result of a £300 program that with a bit of attention could create a less "artistic looking" and more "exact" result. Questions abound...
What is the difference between a machine that creates a drawing with erratic lines that look like what we've come to associate with a free-spirited artist and the real thing? But also: what is the difference between this particular robot and a photocopier with someone placing their private parts on top of it (or any other part of their anatomy)? Or a camera?
Not that much I would say to the second question. Photo-editing software can also turn any photo into something that looks like a textured painting made with palette knife. But that doesn't necessarily let artists breathe more easily in response to the first question.
What gives the current robot ("worker" in its original Slavic meaning) it's publicity value is it's erratic/creative use of lines, which ever since the invention of photography has delineated artists from "mechanical" photography.
Apart from Rembrandt's sketches and etchings in the 17th Century, we have to wait until after the invention of photography before artists started to use "inexact" lines to distinguish themselves from the new all-conquering camera. But then of course soon after photographers started to manipulate their shots to create startling results and get away from faithful renderings of reality. Photography became creative and joined the arts.... All very confusing....
Whilst my work is currently largely hand-made (and I love that) I am not dismissive of mass reproduction and technology aided creativity. I've been particularly impressed with what can be done with programs like Photoshop on screen. All of this is an interaction with and blurring of the boundary between man and machine, which is fine by me. What maybe Paul Tresset's Rubens Robot achieves is a lowering of the man-created distinction between "repetitive machine" and "artistic genius", and that may not be a bad thing.
