Heterobota tests our threshold for machines to exist outside of servitude and develop their own creative pursuits. Here, audiences are invited into the home of four-legged robots – Basia Spot, Omuzana Spot and Bunny Spot – to observe and interact with them as they go about their daily routines. Playing, resting and painting in their studio, the robots make their own artworks and their behaviours and creative capacity seemingly echoes our own.
While futuristic for our current time, the artwork produced by the robots represents a basic stage of machine-made painting. As the first paintings made semi-autonomously by robots, the shapes, patterns and mistakes they make reflect this moment in technological history. As artificial intelligence and robotics continue to accelerate and converge could it be possible that a future race of sentient robots look back at these paintings as the ‘neolithic artefacts’ of their distant forebears?
