Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence robot who makes drawings, painting, and sculptures.
Ai-da was devised by Gallery Director Aidan Meller, with academic research by Researcher and Curator Lucy Seal, and she was made by Engineered Arts Ltd, and PhD students from the University of Oxford.
Ai-Da ‘looks’ in the mirror that is integrated with her camera eyes and with the help of algorithm programs transforms it into coordinates. The hand of the artistic robotic, calculates a virtual route and interprets the coordinates to create the artwork.
Ai-Da, whose name is a combination of the acronym for artificial intelligence (AI) and a reference to Ada Lovelace – the English mathematician and writer well known for her advances in computing alongside Charles Babbage – is hosting her first ever exhibition. She has cameras installed behind her eyes that she uses to comb her surroundings, which in turn inform her creations.
The style is influenced by the breakthroughs in portraiture from the early twentieth century, including the expressionist and cubist movements. Ai-Da’s portraits are distorted, jagged and fragmented, where the identity and character is both perceivable and obscured at the same time. Ai-Da’s urgent, splintered style reflects our current world as we navigate a world morphing in response to advancing technological developments and a destabilising environment.
Ai-Da is a life-size android artist robot that uses AI (computer algorithms) that mimic the intelligence of humans and can paint, sculpt with very minute details.