Robot music is an ongoing robotic research project between Goto80 and Jacob Remin, centered around automation, creation and loss of control. The project was initiated in 2017 and has been shown in various forms at Illutron (Copenhagen), Algomech Festival (Sheffield), Internetdagarna (Stockholm), 34C3 (Leipzig), among others.[1]

Central to robot music, is robotic arms that play music on a Commodore 64 and other sound machines. The robot remixes pre-made songs, or makes its own. While the robot performs, the artists sit next to it to talk to people about robots being “creative” and “stealing our jobs”. [1]

Natalie Jeremijenko (born 1966) is an artist and engineer whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. She is an active member of the net.art movement, and her work primarily explores the interface between society, the environment and technology. She has alternatively described her work as "X Design" (short for experimental design) and herself as a "thingker", a combination of thing-maker and thinker. She is currently an associate professor at New York University in the Visual Art Department, and has affiliated faculty appointments in the school's Computer Science and Environmental Studies.[1] She directs the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, which is modeled on the health clinic model, but offers patients prescriptions not for pharmaceuticals but for art, design and participatory projects. [2]

The Telegarden is an art installation that allows web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm.[1]

Users participate in tending a living garden using a remote industrial robot to perform simple requests such as watering, planting and viewing the garden. Users are presented with a simple interface that displays the garden from a top view, the garden from a global composite view and a navigation and information view in the form of a robot schematic. By clicking on any of the images one commands the robot to move to a new absolute location or one relative to where they just were. The robot, upon completion of the move, will return a refreshed image of the garden. In this manner one can explore the entire garden remotely using simple mouse clicks. [2]

The robot performs users requests on a first come first server bases. Because of this multiplexing of the robot more than one user can be within the garden at once. By using the member tracker overlay one can not only see who but where other members are within the garden. If they wish to communicate with these other members they can enable or enter the village square. The village square is a public message chat system where people within the garden can discuss subjects of their choice. [2]

To water the garden users align the camera image over the section of the garden to water and press the water button. This will command the robot to release a small squirt of water over the area in view. To plant a seed a user is first requested to find a spot that is relatively empty (there are no restrictions to where one can plant) and then asked to press the plant button. This will cause the robot to poke a small hole in the ground, proceed to the seed bowl, suck up a seed and deposit it back into the previously dug hole.[2]

The Telegarden is a community project where users interact not only with the garden but amongst themselves. The project was created to push the possibility of web interaction using customizable user options, chat areas, garden movie making, web cameras, etc.[2]

CYFEST is one of the largest international media art festivals, it was founded in St. Petersburg in 2007 by independent artists and curators. The festival promotes the emergence of new forms of art and high technology interactions, developing professional connections between artists, curators, engineers and programmers around the world and exposing wide audiences to the works in the field of robotics, video art, sound art and net art.

From Art & Electronic Media:

In 1956, Philips engineers helped Nicolas Schöffer create CYSP I, which employed an “electronic brain” connected to sensors that enabled the human-scale kinetic sculpture to respond to changes in sound, light intensity and colour, and movement, including that of the audience. The whole sculpture moves on four rollers and its sixteen polychrome plates, which pivot and spin at different rates depending on external stimulus. It premiered in a performance with the Maurice Bejart dance company, interacting with the dancers on the roof of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, accompanied by concrete music composed by Pierre Henry. This early responsive, robotic sculpture is perhaps the first work of art to explicitly incorporate the principles of cybernetics (CYSP is an acronym formed from the first two letters of the words cybernetic and spatiodynamic). It has had an extensive exhibition history and the sculpture survives in the artist’s estate.

From Leonardo Archive:

The whole is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the whole catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity. All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture consisting of combined travel and animation.

For example: it is excited by the color blue, which means that it moves forward, retreats or makes a quick turn, and makes its plates turn fast; it becomes calm with red, but at the same time it is excited by silence and calmed by noise. It is also excited in the dark and becomes calm en intense light.

Inasmuch as these phenomena are constantly variable, the reactions are likewise ever changing and unpredictable, which endows the mechanism with an almost organic life and sensitivity.

From Wikipedia:

Lozano-Hemmer is best known for creating and presenting theatrical interactive installations in public spaces across Europe, Asia and America. Using robotics, real-time computer graphics, film projections, positional sound, internet links, cell phone interfaces, video and ultrasonic sensors, LED screens and other devices, his installations seek to interrupt the increasingly homogenized urban condition by providing critical platforms for participation. Lozano-Hemmer’s smaller-scaled sculptural and video installations explore themes of perception, deception and surveillance. As an outgrowth of these various large scale and performance-based projects Lozano-Hemmer documents the works in photography editions that are also exhibited.

From Theartstory.org:

After Paik's departure from Germany and before his arrival in the United States in 1964, he spent a year in Tokyo with his family where he met Shuya Abe, an engineer specialized in experimental physics and electronics, who became Paik's long-term collaborator and technical assistant. During the sojourn in Japan, Paik devised his first automated robot, Robot K-456, with Abe's help. Paik humorously named this life-sized anthropomorphic robot after Mozart's piano concerto No. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456 (a catalogue number in the Köchel listing - an inclusive, chronological catalogue of compositions by Mozart). Robot K-456 is made out of bits and pieces of metal, cloth, a data recorder, wheels for walking, and a loudspeaker playing John F. Kennedy's speeches. The materials reflect Paik's long-term interest in transforming cheap, disposable objects into aesthetic forms associated with new technologies. Originally androgynous - with breasts and a penis, the robot was programmed to walk, talk, and defecate beans via twenty radio channels and a remote control. Its physical composition, hybrid-gendered nature, and remote-controlled movement embody Paik's desire to humanize robotics without hiding its bare-bone structure and materiality under the glossy metallic skin.

Robot K-456 was built for impromptu street performances, as Paik recounted, "I imagined it would meet people on the street and give them a split-second surprise, like a sudden show." It was first featured in the performance project Robot Opera (1964) at Judson Hall in New York, alongside Charlotte Moorman's cello performance, and in a series of performance-based projects through the end of the 1960s. In 1982, the robot returned to action during the artist's first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At one point of the exhibition, Paik took the robot out of the museum to orchestrate an "accident" on the streets, a performance titled First Accident of the Twenty-First Century. The robot was made to walk up the sidewalk outside the building across Madison Avenue. While crossing 75th Street, it was struck and thrown onto the crosswalk by a car driven by artist William Anastasi. The local CBS affiliate covered the incident. When the CBS reporter asked Paik what it all meant, Paik answered that he was practicing how to cope with the catastrophe of technology in the 21st century. He also noted that the robot was twenty years old and had not had its Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony) yet. Playful and extravagant, the performance concluded with the "body" of the robot being wheeled into the museum. This street performance demonstrated that Paik did not see his artworks as inert and complete but rather as "living" objects that could be constantly remade and refashioned.

The hybrid, complex nature of Robot K-456, with its unexpected juxtaposition of visual materials, sounds, performances, and popular culture, embodied Paik's foresight into the future of robotics. He was also revolutionary because he claimed robotics as a viable medium for use in multimedia art, triumphantly declaring the potential for artistic innovation through technological means. Throughout his career, Paik would adamantly advocate that the artist's duty was to reimagine technology in the service of art and culture.