Axel Straschnoy (born 1978) is a visual artist and filmmaker from Buenos Aires, based in Helsinki. His work deals with the social practices surrounding objects of knowledge.
Many machines have been created to make art. But all of them make art that humans can perceive and like. What would happen if robots made instead art for each other?
The New Artist is a collaborative research project by Ben Brown, Garth Zeglin, Geoff Gordon, Iheanyi Umez-Eronini, Marek Michalowski, Paul Scerri Sue Ann Hong and Axel Straschnoy that took place at the Robotics Institute between 2008 and 2011.
Its objective was to create purely robotic art, namely art done by robots for robots.
“We humans are observers of this robotic relationship and that returns us, probably, to the traditional passivity of the museum spectator as it is no longer possible to interact with the art at hand. Our observation is mediated by the recording of the actions of the ‘performer’ and ‘spectator’ robots, however the experience of trying to understand, from an art history perspective, the interaction of both robots allows for the reflection that there simply is no explanation.”
Roberto Amigo, History
“The performer bounces up and down and in circles, struggling to impress the critic, who applauds and nods his head, but quickly becomes bored, signified by freezing. As a result, the performer has to increase his efforts and jump around even more frenetically, which the critic, in turn, rewards with applause. However, what looks like a gimmick has a serious scientific background in cybernetic research, which asks the following questions: 'Can the evaluation of art be analysed, deciphered, and reduced to mathematical algorithms? Can humans bring about and ultimately understand the artistic interaction between robots? Can there be art outside of human experience? Can humans ever appreciate art made by and for robots?’”
Gottfried Hattinger, Machine Book