Robot Art is a world-wide competition currently in its fifth year that highlights the artistic and technological achievements of both man and machine. This year, 38 teams from 10 countries submitted 200 different artworks up for consideration.
“Teams can enter up to six paintings in each of the competition categories of ‘original artwork’ and ‘reinterpreted artwork’ where a reference image or existing artwork is used as a reference,” according to Robot Art.
Winners were determined based on a combination of factors: “public voting (over 3,000 people with a Facebook account); judges consisting of working artists, critics, and technologists; and by how well the team met the spirit of the competition—that is, to create something beautiful using a physical brush and robotics and to share what they learned with others.” You can learn more about the contest rules here.
Below are the top three robotic masterpieces from the event (but if you’re curious, head over to Robot Art to view the full list of winners).
1st Place: PIX18 / Creative Machines Lab
PIX18/Creative Machines Lab out of Columbia University earned the top stop, winning a whopping $40,000. The project’s high level of brushstroke skill and deep learning algorithms allowed the team to create impressive original and composition pieces.
“When they used a photograph as a source they were able to create plenty of variation from the original and used a fluid medium to produce an atmospheric and open-ended visual experience,” according to Robot Art.”
Below you can see a reinterpretation of a black and white portrait of a man (oil on panel, 12″x18″).
Working off an existing image is one thing, but what original creative power does this robotic system have? Well take a gander below, which features a unique example of robot-centric art, straight from the “mind” of a machine.
The artwork is titled Field (24″x18″), and is described as a “random mathematical vector field, oil on panel.”
To view the full list of submissions from PIX18/Creative Machines Lab, click here.
2nd Place: CMIT ReART
Following close behind was CMIT ReART from Kasetsart University, Thailand. Taking home $25,000, the programmers coded the robot stroke by stroke, “using a haptic recording system that generates volumes of data about the position of the brush and the forces being exerted.”
When the system is replayed, the device generates precise reproductions of the original brush movements. Below you can see a piece in the reinterpreted category, using Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night as reference.
“In this artwork, we present a haptic human-robot collaboration system based on a master-slave delta robot. We first use the bilateral control with motion copying system to record both the interaction force and position responses from the artist,” says the team, according to Robot Art. “We then use the motion replaying system with haptic processing to recreate artwork.”
The total haptic file (position and force data) sizes for recreated artwork are about 3.563 GB.
Kasetsart University’s original artwork submission is called Bohr Model. The Bohr model was proposed by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in the early 1900s to explain an electron’s orbit around the nucleus. “In this artwork, colors are used to represent the energy level of the orbit of electron,” the team states.
The entire paintbrush procedure took 60 minutes to complete, totaling a haptic file size of about 820.973 MB.
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Click here to view CMIT ReART’s entire collection.
3rd Place: CloudPainter
Rounding out the top three is CloudPainter from Gonzaga University, walking away with a $10,000 prize. The team incorporated machine-learning technology, such as Style Transfer with TensorFlow algorithms from Google. This allowed CloudPainter to create portraits with varying degrees of abstraction.
In the reinterpreted category, the device designed a piece named Kids 2017.
One of the judges from last year’s competition noted, “A key point to keep in mind is that in every case the robot is a tool, more sophisticated than a brush, but depending fundamentally on the creativity and skill of the humans behind it.”
Stemming from those words, below you can see an original work of art from CloudPainter, entitled Mary (Completely Autonomous Portraiture).
To view all of CloudPainter’s submissions, click here.
