Artist's Statement

    

As viewers, we have become increasingly enthralled by computers’ capabilities, their technical accuracy and the speed with which they achieve results. Pindar Van Arman has constructed Zanelle to suit our expectations. Zanelle, Van Arman’s computer-based system, paints. He has written all software required for her to perform. To create each painting, Zanelle instructs her robotic appendage to make multiple independent design decisions, self-mix up to 24 colors of acrylic paint and apply the medium with upwards of 25,000 intentional brush strokes in a time period of 12-36 hours.



Video of Pindar Van Arman's robot painting.


The viewer desires the elegant waver of the artist’s hand? Van Arman can appease by programming Zanelle to include human-like errors. The viewer desires emotion? This is unattainable and the torturous beauty of the game. The viewer is gifted all visible perfection, masterful precision in the rendering of both abstract and representational digitally coded data, and just prior to total idolatry of an image created to fulfill, flawless with its flaws, the viewer recognizes an absence of soul.

Despite continuous research aimed at developing artificial emotions (and thereby increasing the viability of artificial intelligence), the resulting emotions remain just that: artificial. There manifests a tension between the human need to understand and the belief that understanding undermines the spirit. The drive to reproduce increasingly capable reproductions undermines the need to feel human beyond simply being human.

Zanelle and Van Arman have agreed, disagreed and modified countless images throughout their relationship. Though their interactions have lacked emotional exchange, they have produced a log of information, which streamlines subsequent painting processes. New images pass through algorithms that utilize previous compositional and aesthetic decisions to properly affect the most current input. New positive and negative corrections are made and archived. Van Arman secures paint buckets within reach of Zanelle, calibrates the brush to apply ideal pressure and commands her to begin. When presented the painting in its finished state, viewers should feel the awe and comfort encouraged by the unified surface and image quality. However, comfort is unaccounted for as a void persists; our inclination to define “finished state” as “complete” reveals our misstep and we are grateful for unfulfilled assumptions.


-Annie Peters
writer/visual artist