Unit 3 Robotics and Art

As it can be seen from lecture, industrialization is the key to understanding the importance of robotics and art. It was also really great to see how everything that we have learned in the past couple of weeks can be applied to this weeks topic. More specifically the first and second industrial revolutions tie in art and robotics with a common theme of mass production. The invention of the printing press was extremely influential to the developing world because it allowed books and other forms of writing to be copied and redistributed at a faster rate than ever before. While lecture jumps ahead a couple of centuries in order to better convey the idea of robotics and art, I found it extremely interesting that so many movies and other works of art, from Frankenstein to Blade Runner. That being said, I found the movie "Bicentennial Man" to be a fitting and light-hearted example of how robotics and art come together in a film about a robot who is artistically formed into becoming a "human."  (Click on the link to see the trailer)

Bicentennial Man

Personally, another thing that I found most intriguing from lecture and the Benjamin reading was the idea that negatives of photos could finally be developed into multiple copies. While this doesn't seem like a very large achievement to the expanding technological world that we live in now, it is something that we would take for granted had it not been invented. The world wouldn't know what was going on in current events had the ability to mass produce and copy one photo not been invented. Similarly, the invention and use of robots in order to contribute to the mass production of items that are useful to society can be related to the art of making a motorized vehicle, which was made possible by Henry Ford.

On another note, I found it disheartening that there is dispute between photography and works of art that are created from another physical medium because I believe that both can be credited as art in different ways. And this is the argument being made in Douglas Davis' analysis of the art in the age of digital reproduction, because he is arguing that "images are made to seem casual things of nature," the idea that it is so easy to reproduce works of art takes away from the fact that it is actually art. This is something that I had never thought of before and it was great to have a new perspective on the way that art is created and distributed. 

Works Cited

Robotics + Art Lecture 

Benjamin, Walter, and J. A. Underwood. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Douglas Davis
Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon. (1995), pp. 381-386. 

Images: 

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/10/07/henry-fords-moving-automotive-assembly-line-turns-100/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5YMEwX2-88

http://mustbethistalltoride.com/tag/bicentennial-man/

http://www.sandrophoto.com/category/famous-photographers/