Sabina Raaf: Grower

ArtBots 2005 just went down in Dublin, Ireland, happening in Europe for the first time after 3 years in New York. ArtBots is to robots what dog shows are to little cuddly terriers: A place to show off and strut their stuff. In actual fact, some of the participants aren’t robots in a traditional sense, but anything that moves and has a definite hardware component is welcome. And since the focus is on ‘bots that make art, creative machines only need apply.

This year featured a number of excellent bots, one example being Sabrina Raaf’s Grower. It measures CO2 levels in a space and marks it on the wall with a green marker. Higher CO2 levels are typically generated by more people in the space, and get marked higher on the wall. The result is that Grower indirectly measures people traffic over the duration of an exhibition, while making a graph that looks like grass growing.

Other participants include Watschendiskurs by Frank Fietzek and Uli Winters features a frog and a cat discussing language theory, occassionally ill-temperedly slapping the other to make him shut up. Outerspace by Markus Lerner and Andreas Stubbe looks like an inquisitive table lamp, eager to explore and interact with people. Curiously Strong by Jessica Banks and Amanda Parkes turns 250 Altoids mints boxes into a kinetic sculpture, with lids opening and closing to create a domino-like structure with its own soundscape.