It seemed almost more like a publicity vehicle for Boston mayor ‘Mumbles’ Menino. He likes to put his name on everything. An interesting enough premise.

Trying to figure out what part of this is hacking, modding, or do-it-yourself….

This is a great implementation of technology!

Who cares if they look pretentious? Maybe the business men running this company are, maybe they are not. It’s not my culture to wear a suit and tie everyday so it’s hard for me to guess if they are smug, and frankly I don’t care.

What I care about it taking this great idea and improving on it so that I can make my own device.

It’s a great post because it stimulates thinking about how robotics are used.

If someone here creates an Arduino-based cheap version of the same device I won’t whine about hearing about that either!

Seems like there are some manufacturing processes on that machine which could be wildly simplified to bring the device into a cheaper mode.

How about instead of a pick-and-drop robot hand, using a kicker and a slide chute and gravity? Mount vertically with rails and the speed could be at least 10x faster -? no?

I have a “robot” at my house that renders photo-realistic art. It’s called an HP Deskjet 6122.

It is a practical means of productions. Seems a stretch to sell it as “Art.” Someone is telling it what to produce so it is really the tool of and artist. The person who chose/designed the images is the designer/artist, and the robotic arm is the paintbrush, if you will.

But that doesn’t get the kind of attention that screaming headlines of “Robot Makes Art!” does, so what can you do — It’s called “Marketing”.

Artaic… Artaic?

So, all the talk about art aside…

Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to just have it, rather than pick up one piece, drop it, go back, get another piece… instead, pick up several pieces of the same color, fill in all the spaces this color is needed, return, load up another color, repeat…?

Granted, its not as showy as a robot arm moving between a mosaic form and a big table/conveyor belt continuously feeding tiles in a very complex verging rube goldberg complexity manner, placing tiles one at a time and returning to grab another.

I have a BFA in Fine Arts. Would you say a sculpture that was made using modern day technology such as power tools and things less valuable as a sculpture done with a chisel? How about the chisel vs doing it with just bare hands and other harder rocks? The technology used to make art is not in question so much as the execution of the work itself. If the visual art communicates the idea the artist intended to the viewer successfully we can view it as good art.

@charlie
“The technology used to make art is not in question so much as the execution of the work itself. If the visual art communicates the idea the artist intended to the viewer successfully we can view it as good art.”

I’ll call BS on the above statement. How can one discern “the idea the artist intended”? this is a logical slippery slope that leads nowhere. What idea was Michelangelo trying to get across? Duchamp? Picasso? Basquiat? Rubens? Nobody knows any of their exact thoughts/ideas.

The above logic would suggest that Norman Rockwell was indeed a much better artist say, Rauschenberg (or anyone else, hell he was probably the best of all).

…and what if the viewer is a moron and is incapable of receiving the artist’s communications? Based on your comment above it would then be “bad” art, since the idea was not communicated.

The thing with visual art that remains constant across all genres and times is the “scene” is the most important aspect of art. without a scene you are obscure even if you have ‘talent’. (think Vincent van Gogh) Art is merely a product of a “scene” (think Warhol).

The above attempt is to make a great “scene”, not great art.

Keep studying.

The scale is astounding for some of those mosaics. I think the scale of the art justifies the use of robots in it’s production.

There are many forms of art, and producing large scale images utilizing technology seems like an efficient way to do it. I like efficiency, and optimization. I admire Artaic.