Robots have also had the opportunity to carry out the work of an artisan, creating ceramic parts.
In this case, the artist in charge is Charlotte Nordmoen, a designer and researcher with a degree in Costume Design from the London College of Fashion, interested in exploring art in relation to technology and science and curious about the impact of artificial intelligence on creative disciplines.
Charlotte Nordmoen did her undergraduate thesis called humanMADE, where she designed a human silicone finger attached to a mechanical arm, driven by a machine learning algorithm, that is, a program that autonomously designs ceramics, and another that interprets the designs and tells the robot how to shape the clay.
This algorithm developed by Nordmoen is mainly based on software that collects images of vases online and interprets their outlines as basic, common shapes for creating a “DNA of vases”. To create a new vase that mixes the different characteristics from the collected images.
Nordmoen explains: “It aims to go beyond the practical aspect of technological unemployment and to ask what happens if a robot takes on the role of an artisan. What does it mean for our notion of craftsmanship as something unique and handmade, as opposed to machine manufacturing? What does artificial intelligence mean for design and authorship? Can machines really replace us?”
It’s possible that with the advances in digital technology, AI and robotics will be able to perform many of the tasks that humans do in a factory, but the work of an artisan, who in this case handles such a fragile material like clay, requires a human touch that is very difficult to replace with the technological revolution, something that several specialists in the field of creativity and artistic abilities agree on.