Robot Zoo? Marks the sixth annual robot-themed show at the Hive Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles curated by Andrew McGregor who is now partnering with artist and astronomer Laura-May Abron for this year’s show. Every iteration of the exhibit has featured traditional fine art with robot subjects and robots that are themselves works of art. This cross-pollination of mediums, philosophies, and technologies has resulted in a unique and vibrant community of scientists, artists, and inventors participating in the show.
This year’s show will offer a more extensive showcasing of animal-generated art, particularly art made by pigeons. One of the intentions behind this is to further expand upon ideas of what is mechanical and what is cultural? Humans and animals are both subjected to processes of automation from the repetitiveness of stereotypical corporate jobs to the predominance of factory farming in modern society as family farms were destroyed and consolidated into factory enterprises. Additionally, humanity has sensed a threat to its distinct creative prowess with the advent of powerful new AI technologies. However, what of the cultural outputs created by non-human animals? What does it mean for agency, zeitgeist, and the value of art itself for work spontaneously created by pigeons pecking at a screen, to be placed alongside art made by humans with paint brushes.
Last year’s show featured the introduction of art from a pigeon named Darwin who was on episode 6 of the Netflix series titled “White Rabbit Project”. Darwin’s episode focused on “Crazy WW2 weapons”. Of the six “crazy” ideas of novel weaponry one was the brainchild of notable behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. He referred to it as Project Pigeon, and with it he tried to train pigeons to guide a missile dropped from an airplane to hit ships in the Pacific Arena. His project was a success in that pigeons learned to steer a simulated missile to ships that they viewed through a small window. They did so by pecking at the image of the ship in front of them, and the pecks controlled steering flaps on the missile so that it stayed on course directly to the ship.
Luckily for the pigeons, they were never deployed on these suicide missions. By the time the project was ready other teams had finally figured out how to implement self-navigation instrumentation.
The producers of the show wanted to do a conceptual reenactment of Skinners’ Project Pigeon. Darwin was one of three pigeons that were successfully trained to do the reenactment and for the purposes of the show they guided a drone to a target.
Darwin will almost certainly be giving a live art demonstration at the opening of the Hive show. In a similar aesthetic and inspired by recent peer-reviewed research showing that rats display a logical fallacy previously only seen in humans, Andrew McGregor will debut an interactive sculpture showing logical fallacies from both humans and rats. It is expected that the rats of Downtown will use the device at different times than the human gallery goers but that both will enjoy and learn from the experience. The interactive sculpture should serve as both a playful idea and serious tool of scientific inquiry and the curators feel that this duality is emblematic of the ethos of the robot-themed shows at the Hive Gallery.
Art from previous shows may be found below.
