Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating small exhibition at the Design Museum on the art robot Ai-Da. Named after Ada Lovelace, the computer pioneer, Ai-Da can sketch faces and talk to her models. I have read quite a bit about this phenomena but sadly Ai-Da wasn’t in the show. It did however explain how cameras in her eyes use facial recognition to scan faces then enable a robotic arm to draw in a fragmentary style. It then went explained how she reaction with people based on AI learned language and gestures. There was another section on how worked with her to design a font based on her discussions with a designer and her copying of the Arial font. I’ve not sure I fully understand but it seemed very clever. Closes 29 August 2021

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the history and future of robots. The show defined robots as mechanical humans and seeing that helps as at times I felt it was more about automatons rather than my idea of robots which have a degree of learned behaviour about them. I was amazed that the show started in the Medieval and Renaissance periods by looking at the church’s use of clockwork machines to explain the heavens and the human body. I loved a delightful mini-monk which could walk across the table. The next section looked at the role of automation in the Industrial Revolution followed by a section on robots in the imagination. This was full of iconic references in popular culture including a replica of Maria from Metropolis, a robot boxing toy I remembered from my childhood and T-800 from Terminator Salvation. A big central display focused on how robots have been built moving from early examples from the 1950s to up to date work. It discussed the ...