I, Human and Eva
Varvara & Mar
Comic Misunderstandings: Robots and Humans is an interactive art installation developed while in residency at the DDT Lab RUK in Trbovlje. The project uses several robots, audience interaction and participation, as well as AI, in order to create collaborative comics between a human and a robot. While talking to one robot and taking a photo with it, another robotic arm draws a comic strip on paper in real-time.
We combine interaction, image and word in order to create a participative visual storyline, which involves human and machine inputs. Much has been said about the considerable improvement of machine intelligence and its creative abilities. What happens if a robot becomes our conversation partner? What kind of stories and relationships could emerge from such a scenario? Our aim is to go beyond words and also apply image and audience interaction. Therefore, we challenged ourselves technically with the format of comics, and operated two different robots at the same time: one as a conversation partner and another as a story writer.
When it comes to the interaction flow, the participant writes a text to start a conversation with EVA. He or she can then create the visuals for his/her comic strip and also hear the robot’s reply to the inserted text. To do that, one takes place next to the humanoid robot EVA (a NAO robot). EVA replies in voice and then a photo is taken. Now, when the comic strip is completed, another robot, Yaskawa robot arm, starts to draw up the story: text and image together, like in a traditional comic book. The robot arm first draws text boxes and text, and then finally adds a sketch in the bottom center. The next participant then can continue the story or make something new.
Regarding publications, there is a growing number of synthetic books, which are totally or partially created by AI-based language models. As artists, we are more interested in the synthetic relations between humans and robots, and also novel publications that talk about such relationships. The aim is to explore in addition to HCI and creative robotics, also new forms of language including the visual one.
RUK / DDTLab produkcija
