Programming robots to make art
On January 31, 2019, during his Picower postdoctoral fellowship in MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Dr. Costilla Reyes shared a short clip of a robotic arm painting a canvas, laying blue brushstrokes across the surface. His post described MIT as a place where people program robots to make art. He shared it as an illustration of robotic art.
How a robot can paint
A robotic arm is a programmable machine whose joints move a tool, here a paintbrush, along a path. To paint, a program has to convert a design into a sequence of positions and speeds for the brush. The finished canvas therefore reflects decisions encoded in software as much as the physical gesture of the arm, which is what makes robotic painting a meeting point of engineering and art.
A series of art-related activities at MIT
The clip belongs to a series of art-related activities from his first year at MIT. In September 2018 he was developing an installation at the intersection of neuroscience, art, and vision for display in MIT’s Infinite Corridor, and in November 2018 he gave a talk at MIT on the neuroscience of associative recall in art, examining how memory and perception shape the way people experience artworks. In 2020 he went on to co-found Senses and Art at MIT, a pandemic-era project that used visual art, music, and movement as paths to calm and connection.