Exhibition of robotic-created artwork

First time in 2020 Seattle (US) showed everyone how beautiful can be robot-created artwork. People could see how to produce something visually beautiful with robots using only a physical brush and robotics. Exhibited paintings were taken from The Robot Art competition – the first-ever contest merged art and technology together. The 1st annual international robotic competition with $100,000 in cash prizes was opened for team registration in November 2015, the winners were announced 7 months later – May 2016. Teams from around the world responded to the challenge by submitting over 70 robot created paintings. Most teams were using existing robotic arms, but the contest was opened to custom hardware, for example swarm, drone or roomba. Teams could use any 8 different manually premixed colours during the entire painting process. These colours were mixed together by the robotic system in an intermediate stage (e.g., on a palette) and there was no time limit for creating the painting. The winning robots were determined based on a combination of public voting, professional judges consisting of working artists, critics, and technologists, and by how well the team met the spirit of the competition. The second edition of Robot Art competition gathered 39 painting robots, more than twice the amount participants it had in its inaugural year. In addition to more robots, there was more artwork – more than 200 paintings were submitted. Regarding to the quality of the artwork, Andrew Conru – the event’s sponsor and organizer noticed: “The quality of the paintings for many of the teams have reached levels that are comparable with human artists. Many of this year’s entries are expressive, layered, and complex.”

Picture: Robot Art 2017 / CMIT ReART: “Steve Jobs” (top), “THE STARRY NIGHT” (bottom).