This robotic painting project establishes a relationship between human gestures and robotic movement linked through the procedural painting behavior developed by visual artist Ilona Lénárd.
The translation from human motion to robotic behavior is a bespoke procedure developed by Serban Bodea and Ana Anton and involved data acquisition, feature extraction and geometric mapping form a CAD interface to robotic motion process. The process was curated by Kas Oosterhuis, creative director of VAA.ONL and head of Hyperbody TU Delft. In 4 working sessions the Robotic Painting team developed and painted 12 1 x 2m canvases. The initial sketch made with an acrylic marker on paper functions as the causative agent generating the character of this series of robotic paintings. Ilona Lénárd made a series of polynuclear sketches to form a genepool of gestures waiting to be processed by the code. The code transcribes and hybridizes the sketches into instructions for the robot arm.
Transition from digitized to robotic motion is done via the step of virtual painting. No visual representation is necessary, as the series of mathematical procedures is in itself a complete formal representation. The process uses a real and a virtual canvas, bound by the range of the robot and by the range of a 3D digitizer. Robotic motion control makes it possible to interpret the pressure and orientation with which the sketch was painted.
By procedurally controlling the parameters in the code, just like manipulating the arm movements for the original sketch, specific characters are built. For each painting, different characters are chosen based on form and composition.
These range from simple to complex, from single to multiple layers, from monochrome to multicolored, from small to large tip of the brush, from slow to fast robotic movements, from smooth trajectories to more angular ones, from nervously changing the angle of the marker to smooth and gradual changes in the position of the tip with respect to the canvas.
The Machinic Emotion series was on display at the Dutch Design Week(2015) and the Dubai Design Week(2017).
Project Team
Ilona Lenard, Visual Artist
Prof. Kas Oosterhuis, Director Hyperbody TUDelft,
Arch. MSc. Ana Anton
Arch. MSc. Serban Bodea