Artists & Robots
10 June - 10 September 2017 Astana Contemporary Art Center (ACAC), Astana Kazakhstan
Grand Palais, Paris, France
This exhibition is jointly organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais
and “Astana EXPO-2017”.
Rmn – Grand Palais selected for artistic component of Astana International Exhibition 2017. The “Astana EXPO-2017” International Exhibition, which is being held in the capital of Kazakhstan from 10 June to 10 September 2017 on the theme of “FUTURE ENERGY”, is inviting visitors to think about the significance of this vital question to humanity, determining as it does the economic and social development of present and future generations. The Astana Contemporary Art Center of Expo Astana 2017, at the centre of the international exhibition site, will play host, alongside the Moscow Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, to the Rmn-Grand Palais, which is presenting, in preview, an exhibition on artificial imagination called “Artists & Robots”, curated by Miguel Chevalier and Jérôme Neutres. This initiative forms part of the international development strategy of the Rmn – Grand Palais, and builds on its position as one of Europe’s leading cultural actors.
This is the first leg of the “Artists & Robots” exhibition and it will later be presented at the Grand Palais in Paris from March to July 2018 in an expanded version before travelling to other countries.
Artists and robots: artificial imagination rules?
Our world has been universally and uniformly transformed by advances in artificial intelligence and its scientific, industrial, financial and domestic applications. We might be forgiven, then, for thinking that art, to paraphrase André Malraux, would be the last (direct) path from man to man. The Artists & Robots project explores this other, less publicised but no less actual dimension of the rule of advanced technology: the advent of the artificial imagination. Is a machine capable of being an artist’s equal? Can a robot ever replace a painter or sculptor? To what extent is there such a thing as artificial creativity? Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci drew dream machines - a floating palace, a helicopter, a tank, an industrial loom. But this kind of visionary genius does not seem to have dared imagine a machine to replace the artist. Machines to create: these are the works presented in the first museographic exhibition organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais to look in detail at artificial imagination in its various artistic materialisations, and to address the major issues raised by this technical revolution: artists who create machines that create art.
The exhibition features seventeen art installations produced between 1980 and 2017, all generated by computer software. These robots have been designed, programmed and set up by artists from thirteen countries whose works are included in the collections of museums around the world. All of the creations presented in this exhibition - paintings, sculptures, mobiles, immersive installations, architecture, design and music - are the result of a collaboration between artists and the robotic programmes they have invented. These computer programmes are not only intelligent, they are also creative, to the extent that they are capable of producing unprecedented forms and figures that give us something both to look at and to think about.
Artists: Memo Akten, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Michel Bret & Edmond Couchot, Miguel Chevalier, Demian Conrad (Automatico), Elias Crespin, Michael Hansmeyer, Raquel Kogan, Peter Kogler, LAb[au] (Laboratory of Architecture and Urbanism), Sonia Laugier & François Brument (In-flexions), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Leonel Moura, Nervous System, Quayola, Stelarc, Patrick Tresset.
Curators: Miguel Chevalier, artist, and Jérôme Neutres, director of strategy and development at the RMN-Grand Palais
Setup exhibition Voxels Productions : Nicolas Gaudelet, Emilie Lesne, Sam Twidale, Antoine Villeret
A film by Claude Mossessian
Video shooting : Claude Mossessian and Thomas Granovsky
