The latest industrial revolution has brought a series of discoveries and developments that are aimed at art and painting this time around, recreating the aesthetic form of emotions. Until recently, it was believed that this art could only be carried out by the human hand.
With the different evolutions in the digital and robotics area, it’s now a fact that we can enter the world of fine arts and combine it with the latest technology. There is one great example of this.
We will explain the artistic technique of automated painting used by the innovative and talented artist Pindar Van Arman, an Art History graduate and a software engineer from the United States who increased his level of creativity by developing algorithms where, together with advanced technology and the assistance of a robotic arm, tasks can be performed that are usually associated with human skill.
In collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI), industrial robotics, machine learning and human guidance, he designed the project called CloudPainter to explore increased creativity, performing tests combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and programming the robots to be as independent as possible.
The artist built a new robot with an “autonomous generative art system” capable of creating works of art with the “deep learning” method. It consists of the robot taking a capture of the image and then making a difference map. On the canvas, the robot will look for sections that differ from the original image, thus filling in the dark tones (grey, black) before the light ones, since these are the ones that differ the most from the white canvas background. The result is a high precision painting made by a robot that is capable of holding the brush with its end effector with great freedom of movement, applying the paint to the canvas where and how it decides; imitating the painting.
Pindar Van Arman says: “I’ve always wondered exactly where creativity comes from. Dissecting my own artistic process and teaching it to robots is my attempt to better understand it.”
This artist has participated in the RobotArt.org contests, organized by businessman and mechanical engineer Andrew Conru. Where art and technology come together. The contest consisted of challenging participants to make a work of art using robotic systems, as these would be the ones to manipulate the brush to express the work of art on the canvas.
In 2018, Pindar Van Arman won first prize in the RobotArt contest. The independent artist, together with CloudPainter, presented 3 works of art, two were portraits imagined by AI, and the third was a work of art based on Cézanne.
Every day we’ll see how advances in technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will become more evident, allowing discoveries to be applied to unexplored areas. However, the development of human creativity will always be a requirement for the performance of these machines.