Single Review on past events

What can an artist do when he gets bored of painting? – Patrick Tresset´s solution: develop a robot with artistic skills. For him there are several reasons for doing this: to understand the drawing activity, to achieve marketable skills for domestic robots or to reach a certain form of immortality. But the most fascinating reason is “to create autonomous systems that are capable of producing drawings that have an aesthetic and emotional effect equivalent to the effect produced by a human-made drawing.”

He defines drawings as an exceptional and unnatural visual experience and as a construction of reality. In contrary to a human painter, his robot called Paul is naïve and cannot be deluded, as he has no memory and no knowledge of what he is doing. Patrick Tresset – who was always interested to represent faces of humans – programs Paul so that he paints portraits automatically. To obtain different perspectives and stages of the drawing process the Artist in Residence uses six Pauls for one single portrait. A portrait session lasts about 20-30 minutes; since his creation Paul has already drawn more than 2000 individuals.

If you want to see them and get to know more about the robot Paul then you can visit the exhibition “Zufallszwänge: Roboterbilder zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst” (“Robot Imagination: Between Art and Science“) from September 28 until October 20 in the Bildungsturm Konstanz. The Zukunftskolleg funds the exhibition. Zukunftskolleg Alumnus Albert Kümmel-Schnur will be curating it.

Patrick Tresset comes from the Computing Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He has been nominated as Artist in Residence by Oliver Deussen from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Konstanz, and by Giovanni Galizia, and will stay until the end of October. Patrick Tresset's main internationally recognised achievements are in the field of computational aesthetics, computational creativity and arts. As Artist in Residence Patrick Tresset will continue his research in robot painting. His current project is called “Aikon-II” − an art-sciences research project mixing art, cognitive computing and robotics to investigate the sketching activity. During his stay in Konstanz he will study the painting strategies by using the robot painting machine that was developed in the group of Oliver Deussen. Together they will present the results of their collaboration as well as individual works in the exhibition in the Bildungsturm.

More information about Patrick Tresset: www.patricktresset.com, and about his current project “Aikon-II”: http://www.aikon-gold.com/