Define Art?

March 2022

datavisualising opinions of art through robotics and performance art

In March 2022, I created an experimental artwork using a programmable robot car to question the definition of art and explore how people perceive it.

A few weeks prior, I had circulated a survey asking respondents to share their thoughts on art—what they consider “art,” how they evaluate it, and whether certain contemporary works qualified. Over 160 people responded, generating a fascinating mix of opinions, including positive, negative, and neutral terms.

Translating Data into Movement

I tallied the frequency of certain words within the survey responses and wrote a program that converted these counts into movement commands for the robot car. For instance:

Positive words (like “creative”) made the car move forward by a distance corresponding to how many times the word appeared.
Negative words (like “meaningless” or “pretentious”) prompted the car to move backward.
Neutral or ambiguous words (such as “emotion” or “subjective”) caused the car to turn by specific angles.

After running this program around 70 times, the robot’s pen traced a complex network of overlapping lines on a large canvas—capturing a visual record of collective sentiment on art.

Final outcome of the robot pen drawing

From Drawing to Erasing

I then repurposed the same robot car in a second phase of the project: placing it on a sand-covered canvas. As the car moved, along with the man-held fan, these tools gradually pushed sand off the surface, transforming a “filled” canvas into a near-blank one.
This act of removal raised questions about the ephemeral nature of art—when does a piece become “finished,” or does the process itself hold the essence?

process of erasing