You know when you walk through contemporary art museums and see some suspicious pieces of “work” that are so abstract, you feel you could have created the same thing with minimal effort? Say, this Robert Ryman piece at the New York Museum of Modern Art, or the Mark Rothko exhibit at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. I don’t claim to be an amazing artist who can do any better, or maybe I’m not sophisticated enough to appreciate the simplicity – but I certainly enjoy Senseless Drawing Robot 2’s work a tad more than the aforementioned pieces.
Created by Japanese artist duo So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi, the Senseless Drawing Robot 2 is an upgrade form the pair’s first edition in 2011. The new robot sucks up paint from an attached bucket and uses its single automated arm to swing and splatter paint onto a blank wall. The series of movements are fairly random – which is what most abstract art is like anyway. At least if you think it’s dumb, perhaps you can blame it on the fact that a heartless machine put no soul into his work.
“As the robot sways from side to side, the swinging motion of the arm is intensified through the physics of inertia, which then manifests itself erratic painstrokes through the quick release of paint from the spray can,” Designboom writes. I didn’t realize robots can have strokes too. From the video below, it looks a little more like the Senseless Drawing Robot 2 was originally intended to spray water on a wall to help clean the surface.
What would be a fun experiment is to have an exhibit full of Senseless Drawing Robot 2’s work and see what art critics think of its work. But before that happens, we’ll just have to turn to you for some opinions. Is this robot’s work a stroke of genius or as full of crap as some of the other contemporary “art” floating out there? Or rather, is this robot just a way for Kanno and Yamaguchi to say art can be done without all the fluff that you find under each piece’s description?
