The Tartan Online: a team of Carnegie Mellon students are working hard to create a robot with artistic abilities. This international competition, created and sponsored by Andrew Conru, an entrepreneur who founded FriendFinder Networks Inc., has cash prizes of up to $100,000 for the winning team’s institution. But more than that, it is a call for collaboration.
3 comments:
This is the perfect example of one of the biggest reasons I chose CMU: the emphasis on the overlap of the arts and the sciences. Being able to blend creativity with technology and logical thinking is something CMU does very well, as this article attests to.
That aside, I think this is an interesting commentary on what art is and what one must do in order to create art. I thought it was especially interesting that the article mentioned that true Artificial Intelligence can be rooted the machine's ability to create art. I was a little confused about the official definition of the robot creating art, but thought it brought up a valid point that a viewer might consider a robot to have it's own individual "aesthetic" if it were able to make things of its own accord. I'm excited to see the results of this competition, and I think it says a lot about our school that this kind of research is going on.
Wow okay I have such opposing feelings. One is definitely pride, I love my school and I love that it does not simply excel in theatre, but all over campus. Also the cross over between fine arts and robotics is very cool.
But at the same time, it kind of makes me feel like I’m living in the prequel of Will Smith’s iRobot movie. We’re going to let robots do our art too?? Really! We can’t give them every job, then there will be nothing left for any humans to do, and no work to make money from! But perhaps that is a bit of paranoia, so I digress.
I do think the Telerobot is very cool, I love the idea of sick or disabled or elderly people who currently can’t partake in art being able to create with the help of these robots. I am a firm believer of art therapy, and in that field, this could be a huge game changer.
This is just one of the things that you just have to wait and see how the world reacts to it. But of course I wish my colleagues the best of luck. Go CMU!
This article definitely goes to show the inseparable connection between art (more specifically, design) and science, which I wasn't aware of at all until I came to CMU. Apart from areas such as lighting, sound and media which are inseparable from technology and science, even the more "hands-on" areas of design such as scenic and costumes are increasingly involved with science with the spurt in technology. I've seen many performances on TV where the performer's costume interacts heavily with the media, with little hidden gadgets here and there to make the performance magical not only on TV screens but also for the live audience watching the performance. Something that stood out to me in this article is how the robots are "not just a tool or a medium, but as something that can inspire and possibly evoke emotion in humans". Although I'm not exactly sure what this entails, this definitely takes things to a completely new level, and CMU is one of the only places that place value both the arts and sciences enough to make it happen.
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