Roxame, the Robot Artist-Painter

Roxame was born at the conjuction of my two most powerful passions, both emerging during my College years.

When a youg boarder, in an inspired place, La Pierre-qui-Vire Abbey (in Burgundy), I was saring with some comrades a monachical way of life (adapted to our your age). There, I learned the bases of water colour painting, guided par the Father Lucas, himself a studend of Maurice Denis. There, also, I felt a strong feeling for all sort of machines... eventually building small mills on the nearby brook. At the end of one of those years, the principal gave me a book with this dedicace "Never forget, Peter, that the most beautiful machine to build is one which makes peope happy !".

 Fully grown, I could satisfty my drive to machines, mainly as a Computer Press journaliste. After hours, I have desgned and bulit somme funny devices. One of the most sophisticated was (at the end of 1979), Max, an "egoistic and ironic robot". His name Max expressed his stratetic principle : variety maximization.

Thouhtful and beggar, Max was exhibiting rather greedy and egotistic behaviours. He showed to passers-by a blinking "Give me a guinea", along with pitiful sqeaks. When the compassionate visitor had paid its offering, Max laughed and blinked "One more galore !". Then he came into action, giving to listen one of two radio programs, selecting the most "varying" according to his own criteria. But he would rahter let the visitor speak into a microphone, or use a small synthetiser. At any time, if he felt danger, for instance after an impact on the room door, he made noisy protests.

At the same time I was painting, too, and sold rather well my watercolour landscapes in small local (Normandy) shows. But, after years, the time spent before my trestle, trying hard to find the perspective of roof, to choose the right pigment, to arbitrate the contradictions of the natural green of a tree and the constraints of air prspective... was turning into boredom. And the more so as the result seemed not to bring any real innovation or originality.

Then, in 2001 spring, I lauched a project into which my two passions could converge : Roxame, a young sister for Max, so to speak, but this one a painter-artist. Neither egotistic nor sarcastic, but nevertheless rather of irreverent charracter. As, to merit my attention and possibly my love, her paintings had to both beautiful and unexepcted. They had to manifest some kind of emergence, as one says in the AI (Artificiel intelligence) community.

During the first months of development, the unexpected had no problem to show itself, due to a systematic use of random algorithms. But pure random is no more interesting that white snow on a unconnected TV set. Could beauty emerge ? It came. At first, just enough to please me. Then to catch the eyes of friend, then to make the paintings received in some galleries and shows.

What pushes my energies to day is to reach a wider public, and why not, some day, the gread word art shows. Because I think that Roxame is asking challenging questions, ant that these questions have to be expressed in media to reach a large audience.

Questions ? The central one : is Roxame really an artist ? Are her works the fruit of hasard or of its program ? Is she somehow human ? Beyond the questions stand the larger perspectives of man-machine relations in the present century.

 In the present state of things, and in spite of my tendency to speak of Roxame as "she"... all that is evidently metaphorical only. Would be for the bare fact that a program of twelve thousands code lines in C++, running on a computer of which memories reach some hundreds of megabytes, cannot be compared to the human brain, with its some hundred billions of neuros, each of which (or at least a great part of which) are as complex as a microcomputer.

Nevertheless, Roxame is designed as radically different from graphical softawre available on the market. She is designed for autonomous work, and every progress makes her more so, even when it intends to give make more attractive its man-machine interactions.

The painting work may start from scratch, with random algorithms generating shapes without any exernal image provided. In this case, the result may be said "abstract", expressing only the program structures and then, indirectly, my own ideas of beauty which guided me in the programming. In other cases, the starting may be an external document, generally a picture. The programs here may be qualified as "filters", rather comparable to the tools provided by Photoshop and the add-ons you can find on the market.

The most interesting works, such as "Manhattan", combine these two approaches. A external picture is given, but this one is more deeply analyzed than by a mere filter : contours are detected, regions are differentiated (segmentation). The structures thus obtained are then used as a basis to apply random algorithms. The result is richer than pure abstraction, but may be as distant of the original document that it is, in the end, impossible to find back what it was.

From the spectator's standpoint, what do mean such works ? The main interrogation, between a work of art, is "What did the artist intend to do ?". Roxame, presently at least, has not the kind of subjectivity which would let us talk about her "intentions". But three tracks may be followed by the viewer in order to make them meaningful for himself :

- look for the design or colour harmony, which partly stem from my painters experience ; in the beginning, for instnce, I chosed a set of 14 hues transposed from my watercolour box ;

- try to figure out what an original picture could have been, giving a final result whic is sometimes totally different ;

- (the best way) make his own trip from what the work is, project his views and feeling from the basically random patters, as one does with some "lanscape stones".

In the future, drawing from advanced robotic technology, Roxame will be provided with an intentional system (even if the word has not exactly the same meaning as for an human being). She will also express "emotions", as do the Japanese entertainment robots.

She will be still more autonomous and bold if anc when :

- she has her own "eyes", at least a camera she could focus according to her mood, placed on an autonomous vehicle, in order to wander around and looking by herself to "what inspires her";

- she could really "paint", and not work through a computer printer ; that could be achieved with an industrial type robot, or with a specifically design appartus; then, the works would have the thickness of a real painting, with its different layers, glazes and varnishes, and the relief of a real brush.

These last kind of developments pose no difficult problems other than time and money. On the contrary, linguistic, semantic, behavioral and emotional progresses open infinit perspectives, and cannot but follow or at best go along with the general progress of "artificial intelligence" and advanced robotics in general.

Being a robot and not a human being, of which the life span is limited (unless medical and bionic progress open the way to immortality), the life and progress of Roxame will not end with her author. As long as somebody wishes to lead further ahead, she will conquer new talents and new worlds.