Summary
"Robot 250" is an old-fashioned art and community project with a techno twist presented as part of Pittsburgh's 250th birthday celebration. I went to Pittsburgh to check out the artist-made BigBots, eleven monumental art works commissioned for "Robot 250" that use robotic parts, and to talk with students who built robots in their schools or used the Mars Exploration Rover technology (called the gigapan) to document and explore their communities. Everyone was high on the project. The artists, in spite of difficulties with their electronically controlled pieces in outdoor environments, were uniformly enthusiastic.
I spoke with artist Ian Ingram who curated the BigBots show and is co-founder of Rossum's (www.rossums.org), a working group for robotic artists and engineers. Ingram made the BigBot piece You're Number 1! on top of the Andy Warhol Museum, but it was no match for the wind storm that recently shredded it. The piece, a 12-foot-tall foam rubber hand with an index finger pointing (like the ones fans wear at sporting events) was connected by circuitry to other spots around town, and when someone activated the piece at the remote site, the big hand on the museum would find the person and point back in a mutual "You're No. 1!" love fest.See the full content of this document
Extract
Off the Wall-E
Off the Wall-E
Robots for art's sake.Behind every robot is a human programmer and builder. Some builders-like Illah Nourbakhsh and his team at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsbur...See the full content of this document
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