Artificial Organisms and Animate Machines

Robot-assisted oil paintings (2024 - 25)

Artificial Organisms and Animate Machines is an investigation into the influence of advancing technologies on the subjective and cultural perception of beauty and the challenges of embodiment by multidisciplinary artist Gretta Louw, as part of the Embodied Agents in Contemporary Visual Art (EACVA) research residency in collaboration with the University of Konstanz, Germany and Goldsmiths University of London, UK.

Two series of oil paintings on canvas integrate AI and robotic creative expression with human authorship and subjective aesthetic preferences. Both series began with an algorithmically generated image of an orchid, the same image being processed slightly differently (colour selection and complexity) before being painted by the "e-David", an industrial robotic arm at the University of Konstanz in Prof. Oliver Deussen’s Visual Computing Department. From this same starting point two distinct series of oil paintings develops, each new sequential canvas a version of the previous one, taking turns between the human artist, Gretta Louw, hand-painting and a robotic painting. In between each canvas, an AI filter is used to ‘perfect’ or ‘beautify’ the floral motif created in the last painting, with the resulting digital image becoming the input for the next canvas.

Thus, a rhizomatic evolutionary process between the human artist, robot, programmers, and AI comes into being. What we see is not only a co-created technoaesthetic or technoromanticism in the paintings, but also how the contingencies, imperfections, irregularities, and errors in each painting are assimilated and become a feature in each subsequent canvas.

A unifying thread throughout Louw’s work — which merges digital and algorithmic tools with traditional art production methodologies such as embroidery and oil painting, contrasting heritage and cutting edge technologies — is an examination of the inextricable intertwining of culture, nature, and technology. Artificial Organisms and Animate Machines uses the motif of orchids: a flower that uniquely embodies the human quest for beauty through technical interventions in ‘natural’, or organic, subjects — embodying the interactions of aesthetics and artifice, culture, economic interests, and science. Orchids are not only the largest family of flowering plants on Earth, naturally occuring everywhere from Alpine regions to the tropics and desert, they are also cultivated for mass production on the one hand and extreme elite sales on the other.

Artificial Organisms and Animate Machines tests the limits of AI and robotic systems, placing them both in contrast to and dialogue with traditional art-making technologies, in an intimate reflection between machinic and analogue painting processes.