Definitely is Robot Art

Jean Tinguely “Homage to New York” 1960

I like Jean Tinguely’s work and one of his work in MOMA sculpture garden is “Homage to New York”. It is a self destroy machine’s performance and it lasted 27 minutes. Nobody knows how long it takes to destroy itself and neither did Jean Tinguely know. Some people took the scraps to their own garden after the performance. I think it is a robot that is given the command to destoy itself and its logic is based on the physical rule of motion but is also unpredictable due to the complexity of the real world.
I also think that people taking the scrap is also part of the robot and make it not a robot that only exists for 27 minutes. Because when we talk about robot we also talk about its environment especially with human being’s existence. In this case, rich people are coming to MOMA to see this show. Part of the robot’s output is that rich people collect something like garbage at that time and made it into collections of greater meaning afterwards.

I think is Robot Art

A sentence strike me when I read “Origin and Development of Robotic Art, Eduardo Kac, 1997” and it is “The works highlighted in this article often evade any narrow definition of robotics – except, perhaps, for the principle of giving precedence to behavior over form.” I am thinking about behavior over form. To me it seems to be the focus is more about pcomp logic rather than fabrication.
From that sentence, I think the following is a robot art, although it does not have any input.
This is an exhibition I saw in Shanghai Minsheng Art Musuem. It is an installation LED Horizon 2020 blinking by Tommi Grönlund, Petteri Nisunen.
The led would be both shining simultaniously when the installation starts on in the beginning and somehow the differences between each led is getting bigger and they would turn out into a more random flikering. In the video, although 2 led close to each other seem to be flikering at the same time, they would turn out to be different after several flikerings. I think it is the manner of this behavior that turns it into a robot.
I don’t think the artists would think this is a robot art because the exhibition name is “Flow with Matter”, which seems to emphasis more about physics. But by calling this piece a robot art, I think I am emphasizing how the behavior of the led matters in this piece.
Although this behavior is not controlled by some microcontroller or computer like many other robots, I think it is still a robot. Perhaps it is using the rules of “RC time constant” that is combination of resistance and capacitors to create this effect.