Madeline Gannon is a multidisciplinary designer who has reinvented the way people communicate with machines. In his research, Gannon mixes art, innovation and technology, a mixture that undoubtedly manages to forge new futures for human-machine relationships. In the same way as the work carried out by Madeline, many are the examples of how technology and artificial intelligence are increasingly sneaking into an activity that seemed reserved for humans, art.
A good example of this is the work ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’, painted by an algorithm, which was awarded at auction at Christie’s in New York for no less than $ 432,500. Another example is the humanoid AI-DA, who has become the world’s first robot artist ; or the AGLAE, a particle accelerator that works in the Louvre Museum, Paris, France.
Today we meet Madeline Gannon, renowned artist, researcher and speaker of a masterclass by Seat at Sónar + D 2019, the International Congress of Creativity and Technology. Gannon’s great skill has served to convince robots to do things they were never created to do, such as transforming a giant industrial robot into a mechanical living creature and taming a herd of autonomous robots to behave like a group of animals. Taking advantage of her time in the city of Barcelona, she has visited the Seat factory in Martorell, to whisper to the 2,000 robots that work 24 hours a day, and that are identical to those that interact with her in her work.
These 2,000 robots from the Seat plant, which can measure up to six meters, work synchronously throughout the day, coordinate with 1,700 employees to manufacture the bodywork of a car every 68 seconds, and are capable of performing up to 16,000 points of welding a day. But, let’s see what the expert thinks of all this …
