SHARON STANCZAK
Ai-Da
Ai-Da’s long, mechanical fingers intrigue me. I like the way that her metallic digits point and gesticulate as words fall from her robotic lips. Her machine parts cause her “fingers” to flex and bend. Her movements are measured, like a large clockwork doll. She appears to be opposite from the living things of this earth: a robot. But she’s also from this earth.
From the first time I saw her on video, I wanted to make art about her, about her humanoid skin, her glass camera eyes, her Lulu wig, and, most of all, her machine arms and hands that appear suprahuman, made of metal parts. How is drawing her body like drawing the human figure? How is it not? And when she speaks using AI, what do her words, her thoughts, do to my art? What do they do to the world?I hang on to her every word, whether produced by algorithm or not. It doesn’t matter. I am trying to see, to feel, to understand and paint this mechanical presence, as well as the inorganic--and organic--other-than-human worlds that she represents.
What about our world?
The Earth is suffering from the cumulative and destructive effects of humanity’s dependance upon fossil fuels for energy. Fires are raging across the globe, destroying wildlife and leaving once fertile fields barren. What will we do to save Gaia? Will we face our own greed, as well our disregard and disrespect for life on Earth in order to save the ecosystem upon which we all rely? Or will we continue to pretend like our planet isn’t dying, while people perish, species go extinct and our trees are reduced to cinder.
Drawing Robots
The lithe, little robot did a backflip, landing on all fours before moving sideways across the floor. MIT’s Mini-Cheetah was agile and flexible, and it moved across the lab floor with ease. I was handed the controls and the scientist warned me not to make it run too fast in the small space. It can run up to 28 mph. In spite of being clumsy with controls, that day I was too excited to make a mistake and somehow, I maneuvered Mini-Cheetah up and down the floor.
I spent the day drawing from the robot's prototype, a large compilation of wood, metal and plastic parts that resembled the body and head of a cheetah in the wild. I also drew from a single, mechanical cheetah leg, that was learning to move. I used traditional materials for my drawings: paper and charcoal. These are the same materials that I favor when drawing from the human body, because I wanted to understand the robot’s form in the same way that I do the human form. I wanted to know its hard lines, its round parts, its mechanization through the way that I can relate to it. That’s by feeling the charcoal on my fingers, by smearing it against the paper, by capturing its shape and essence with my eye and hand.
