HESITANT HAND by Pakui Hardware, 2017
Materials: Industrial ABB IRB 2600 robot, transportation boxes, UV print on silicone, images from NASA digital archive, PVC plastic, silicone rubber belts, concrete, stainless steel
PH thanks to ABB Robotics Lietuva, Ona Lozuraityte and Petras Isora
All images by Andrej Vasilenko
Courtesy: the artists
Commissioned by National Gallery of Art, Vilnius
Over the past years we have been gradually delegating our routine tasks to our tools: the private environment and the industry is becoming increasingly automated, when people both at home and at work act among programmable non-human beings. In contemporary theory this automation was named a fourth technological revolution, when machines operate with each other in a network without a visible human intervention. Mechanical human work is substituted here by the robotic choreography, while the man took more virtual role in the system by being responsible for programming and providing connectivity and energy supply for their automated colleagues. It is an autonomous ecosystem, a post-human collective which is rapidly expanding by including more and more mechanical beings.
An industrial robot in the exhibition creates its own spatial and constantly changing exposition. Humans – both artists themselves and the viewers – here become rather observers of the choreographic movements of the robot, which shifting around objects created specially by the artists. What resembles an industrial scenography at first glance becomes a stage for the dynamic interactions of the robot and the objects that blend the mechanized and the organic into inseparable bodies. While observing this hypnotizing process, the motion trajectory of the robot starts to resemble a hesitant and pensive hand moving chess figures around the board.