Back in August, the Ideas section of the Sunday Globe had a short piece by Kevin Hartnett on a robot that creates art. Well, a robot that copies art. It’s a discomforting notion.
“When you watch an artist paint,” writes Hartnett, “individual brush strokes can seem random. It’s often not until close to the very end that the image the painter is after becomes clear. This is doubly true when you watch e-David, the robot painter, at work. e-David (the name stands for ‘Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Image Display’) was created by a team of engineers at the University of Konstanz in Germany. It’s a former welding robot that has been retrofitted to reproduce, brush stroke by brush stroke, existing works of art. The robotic arm has access to five different brushes and 25 colors of paint, and after each dab of paint, it takes a photograph of what it has painted so far. Computer software analyzes the photograph and tells e-David where to place the next brush stroke.
“The strangeness of the process is especially evident when e-David signs the art at the end, beginning by making the dot over the ‘i’ and then writing the rest of its name backwards.” More.
Having recently read an amusing novel about the Gardner heist, The Art Forger, I can’t help thinking that e-David could have quite a career — maybe not fooling any experts but at least making serviceable reproductions.
Photo: Oliver Deussen, University of Konstanz
Painting by e-David, a robot 
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