Capturing the central themes of the exhibit is a robotic drawing arm, which translates images fed to it into "robot-draw" artworks. Wired.co.uk spoke to Ben Sadler, one of the artists behind Juneau Projects, to find out more about its robotic centrepiece.
"Phil [Duckworth] and I have been working together as Juneau Projects for 12 years. Throughout that time a lot of the projects we've made have addressed items of technology and our interest the historical side of the depiction of landscape in art," explains Sadler. Early works saw the duo destroying readily available items of technology, from mobile phones to Walkmans, to create subject matter for their work. "We wanted to see if we could make creative pieces from broken technology. Since then we've developed our interest in how the machines and the tools that we use are also collaborators in the art that we produce."
A project that Sadler and Duckworth worked on last year saw them create Photoshopped collages of post-apocalyptic scenes, which groups of children would then interpret with their own paintings. "We really liked the way that the paintings they did took these collages we'd made somewhere entirely different," says Sadler. It led the duo to explore ways in which they might collaborate with a controllable agent, a machine, to create interpretations of their own work.
"We saw a residency at Watershed Artist Residencies, and applied initially with the idea of collaborating with an artificial intelligence to create artworks, or to explore an idea for an artwork with an AI," explains Ben. Ideally, they would work with something similar to Cleverbot, an online "chat" bot that offers (somewhat limited) responses to a user's questions and statements. After some promising paintings resulting such a collaboration with an AI (including a bizarre painting of golden zombies), discussion with other resident artists at Watershed led Juneau Projects to realise that it wasn't AI that they wanted to take artistic inspiration from, but from the behaviour that emerges from a machine as it carries out a programmed task.
The residency at Watershed led to Juneau Projects collaborating with Ad Spiers, a robotics research fellow of Bristol University and creative technologist that was also resident at the studios. By working with Spiers, the artists were able to experiment with various ways in which a robot might draw. "We realised this was a much more focused way of taking the project forward, and worked on creating a bespoke drawing arm that would take drawings that we gave it and -- through the mechanics of how it's constructed and the software it uses -- would create its own unique versions of those drawings."
The images that Juneau Project supply their robotic drawing arm are first created as vector drawings. These are converted into a text file, which translates the image into coordinates for the arm to follow. Rather than producing immaculate reconstructions of drawings as other existing robotic arms are able to create, Juneau Projects sought to allow the "shake and wobble" of the robotic arm's three mechanical motors to influence the resulting artwork; every line it draws has a slightly different accent and path, creating new interpretations of the original image each time.
The arm that features in the Infocalypse Stack exhibition is a working prototype, at once part of the overall exhibition's themes of an information apocalypse, but also a creator of "robot drawn" artworks that will then sit within the exhibition. "It takes as its premise the idea that there's been some kind of technological disaster that's altered the world," says Sadler. "The objects that we're showing are our imaginings of what would be created within this society."
The robot arm sits within a perspex display case, appearing to be a remnant of an artificial intelligence that led to the destruction of the world as we know it, scribbling away at drawings of imaginary creatures -- birds and animals that the robot has envisioned. "What it's drawing in this exhibit is a series of line drawings of imaginary animals that we've fed the robot, and which we then add paint to by hand -- it's like a vestry of creatures that people might expect to find within this futuristic landscape we've created."
Alongside the robotic drawing arm are a series of perspex sculptures, and a shrine of memories exploring how the disaster occurred. The exhibit at Ceri Hand Gallery runs from 22 February to 23 March.
Juneau Project plans to continue working with robots, developing their techniques with the drawing arm in the same way they came to develop their more traditional painting techniques. The team sees their current model as an artist's proof, which might be joined by further editions that people could buy. Having kept the project opensourced, they're interested to see what others might create with the robotic arms.
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