Soft Art

Love, Peace, and Unity: Typical Robot Landscapes

A project with Marc Ngui.

Drawing made in flash forms a vignette to a sewn fabric landscape that incorporate two small light powered robots and three decoys in a colour extravanza teeming with life.

30 April to 4 July 2004
Harbourfront Centre
Free

Click image to get larger file.

From the press release:
As the science of artificial intelligence evolves, it challenges the way we work and play. Robotic arms have changed the manufacturing industry. Robotic pets populate our homes. Digifest presents an exhibition that imagines the living environment of landscape for such robots. The exhibition pairs 8 artist teams with a small consumer robot named Fred.

Part of digifest 2004: On the Move.
Curated by Paola Poletto

# 1 one of eight display cases
# 2 from the front
# 3 peeking into the right side
Imagine that the bubble encrusted robot is a nanobot, traveling through a life system, perhaps your own body.

In the drawing these robots are tiny, a mere eighth of an inch wide circles that travel around the landscape in "V" formations, fulfilling their unexplained purpose. In the lower right corner they are being launched out of a mechanical looking tiny spaceship, the nanobot deployment device.

Behind the drawing the scale is enlarged, so that the robot bubble is now the size of an orange, and the landscape has shifted in scale as well.

The colours and colour combinations are the same as in the drawing - cyan and yellow; red, yellow and fuschia - but the forms are as if a detail view of what is in the drawing.

The yellow tag identifies Marc Ngui as a Diagrammatician and Magda Wojtyra as a Process Curator. The 12 legend words and phrases are seemingly cross referenced to the drawing, but the arrow tags are empty!

The drawing and soft sculpture components teem with unbounded life. Resembling a coral reef, the soft undulating landscape swims with fine detail and vibrant colour, reminding us of the unstoppable nature of life.

# 4 peeking into the left side
# 5 "coral" wall with nested robot bubbles
# 6 yellow tantacle and orange snakes

# 7 tag close-up		 Drawn in flash and printed with pigment inks on glossy paper by an Epson 2200. The fabric is all wool and the stuffing polyester.
just the drawing - very large image!