Exhibition
Robot-in-the-Loop: interactive media installations
Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA Yerevan)
47 Avet Avetisyan St. Mon–Sat: 11:00 – 20:00
Opening: October 19, 7:00 PM
Exhibition: October 19–25
Parallel Event
October 16 - November 17
Opening: October 16 7:00 PM
Tuan Mu＆Lu Wei Dual Solo Exhibition: Echoes in Calligraphy
This exhibition brings together three installations that explore the growing agency of machines and their capacity for creative expression.
In Dialogue, Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov restage Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam as a mechanical exchange between two robotic hands. Programmed gestures unfold in a feedback loop of recognition and response, suggesting that the act of creation is no longer unilateral. The machine becomes both subject and author — an autonomous agent within the creative process.
Different Robot by Anna Frants features Anatoly, a robot-hand that reacts to variations in voice volume and speech, translating sound into movement. Through these spontaneous interactions, the work proposes that creativity can arise from algorithmic responsiveness and chance.
In Emotionally Aware Robot, a system of sensors and mechanical gestures generates affective reactions in real time. The machine’s interpretive behavior exposes a form of technological intuition — one that mirrors, transforms, and even invents emotion.
Together, these works propose a subtle shift: from using machines to create art, to seeing them as capable of participatingin creation.
Anna Frants
Different robot
Art :: Tech by Anna Frants Engineering lead: Philipp Avetisov Engineering team: Philipp Avetisov, Eugene Ovsyannikov, Dmitry Shirokov, Maxim Lukin C, Python, Arduino and Raspberry PI boards, stepper and servo motors, web camera, microphone, PLA plastic Technical Description: The Robot is driven by stepper motors that define the primary trajectories of its movement. Control is implemented through a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with software developed in C++ and Python. For data input, the system employs a wide-angle digital camera, a microphone, and an ultrasonic sensor. Output devices include a paper-feed mechanism, the robot’s “eyes” mounted on a servo drive, and an optional display.
Andranik Meliksetyan
Emotionally Aware Robot
Engineering team: Engineering City (Yerevan, Armenia) Concept: Anna Frants Supported by Art :: Tech CYLAND Program Python, real-time camera, Arduino controllers, stepper and servo motors, aluminum profiles, steel, PLA plastic. Python, real-time camera, Arduino controllers, stepper and servo motors, aluminum profiles, steel, PLA plastic. Emotionally Aware Robot stages an encounter in which contact is never neutral. By turning facial expressions into mechanical gestures, the artwork shifts attention from what is seen to how it is interpreted. The robot’s reactions — precise yet imperfect, attentive yet unstable, — reveal not only the limits of artificial empathy, but also the ambiguities of human expression. Rather than simulating emotion, the media installation exposes the fragile overlap of technology and perception. The Robot becomes a mirror that does not simply reflect but refracts, inviting the viewer to witness how communication falters, adapts and emerges at the threshold between human and non-human intelligence. Technical Description: Emotionally Aware Robot features all in one solution encapsulating all the control equipment in the robot’s body. In its core it has an industrial grade embedded controller featuring real time processing and FPGA for time critical operation. The smooth movements are achieved by using stepper motors with integrated drivers with close loop capability to turn stepper motors into servo motors. The entire robot is designed in SolidWorks and 3D printed using durable materials. The robot is a 6-axis manipulator with added parts to display emotions.
Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov
Dialogue
multimedia object, 2018 Robotics, Arduino, servomotors, computer programming, podium Engineer: Alexey Grachev The Man usurps functions of the Creator. The Man creates the Machine. Then the Machine usurps functions of the Man, creates the Machine on its own and starts interacting with the Machine. This is our future. Nevertheless, the artist reserves the right to imagine that the dialogue between the creator and the subject of creation remains the same. Gestures of the robotized hands perform the very same emotional dialogue that could have transpired between the Creator and the Man if we are to animate Michelangelo’s fresco “The Creation of Adam”. Menace, despair or humility: the creator robot starts; the creator man responds. And everything is controlled from the same electrical outlet. That is to say, there is no difference: the creation menaces itself and forgives itself.
CYFEST midpoint: Parallel Event
Tuan Mu＆Lu Wei Dual Solo Exhibition : Echoes in Calligraphy
Writing, whether accumulated from bodily experience or generated by artificial intelligence, can no longer convey truth or knowledge. Rather, both approaches reveal the hidden relations underlying writing, the body, and the mind. In doing so, they put the essence of writing into question.
In this dual solo exhibition “Echoes in Calligraphy”, Taiwanese artists Lu Wei and Tuan Mu present video artworks developed from their ink painting practice, addressing themes of gender, the digital, mythology, and nature. The exhibited artworks reflect on the subject’s consciousness in ink arts, exploring how artists and viewers, through diverse modes of visual imagination, could transcend the limits of the physical body, allowing subjectivity to flow across different dimensions. By dissolving and reconfiguring the inherent symbolic meaning of images, the works unfold from difference, bringing forth each artist’s perspective on contemporary calligraphy and ink painting.
In his artworks, Tuan Mu seeks to reinterpret the traditional and unique worldview of Asian cultures through new media, and to explore, with a poetical approach, human perception and thought in the age of technology. In the exhibition, his video artwork “Astvats” draws on medieval Armenian manuscripts and religious texts, using AI algorithms to reassemble text and imagery. The work explores the stability of language as a vessel for faith, while reflecting on the potential of artificial intelligence to create new myths and languages. In “Calligrapedia : A Universal Algorithm”, the artist combines Chinese calligraphy, natural imagery, and oral storytelling, using machine learning to reconstruct forms of writing, flowing between humans and all things.
Lu Wei’s artworks reference cross-cultural female symbols and the figure of the mother, in reflection of her embodied experiences of being both a woman and a mother. Her three-channel video installation “Mirrors” combines poetry, calligraphy, and performance. Using the distinctive visual language of ink and a feminine perspective, the work reinterprets the concept of “shadow” through moving images. “Mirrors” explores religion, literature, mythology, and the archetype of the mother from multiple perspectives, aiming to examine and heal female figures who, throughout history, have been both creatively inspiring yet burdened with negative associations. The work symbolically depicts the artist’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood, while also reflecting on the multifaceted nature of motherhood. It considers how the unique shadow-like qualities of ink as a medium seep into the visual language of video.
The exhibition “Echoes in Calligraphy” seems to open multiple windows onto this question of writing: when life experience, memory, and symbols are reassembled and regenerated through the artists’ practice, how might we reimagine the subject, meaning, and methods of writing?