Human Study #1,  is an installation where the human becomes an actor. In a scene reminiscent of a life drawing class, the human takes the sitter’s role to be sketched by a number of robots. When the subject arrives by appointment, he is seated in an armchair. An assistant attaches sheets of paper onto the robots’ desks and wakes each one up, twisting its arm or knocking three times.

The robots, stylised minimal artists, are only capable of drawing obsessively. Their bodies are old school desks on which the drawing paper is pinned. Their left arms, bolted on the table, holding black Bic biros, are only able to draw. The robots, RNPs all look alike except for their eyes, either obsolete digital cameras, or lowres webcam. Their eyes focus on the subject or look at the drawing in progress. The drawing sessions last up to 30 min, during which time the human cannot see the drawings in progress. The sitter only sees the robots alternating between observing and drawing, sometimes pausing. The sounds produced by each robot’s motors create an improvised soundtrack. The sitter is in an ambivalent position, at the mercy of the robots’ scrutiny, but also as an object of artistic attention. As the model in a life drawing class, the human is without personality, an object of study. The human sitter is passive, the robots taking what is perceived as the artistic role. Although immobile, the model is active in keeping the pose, for the spectators the sitter is an integral part of the installation.

The RNP was originally developed by Tresset to palliate a debilitating painter’s block. It could be seen as a creative prosthetic or a behavioral self-portrait. Even if the way Paul draws is based on Tresset’s technique, its style is not a pastiche of Tresset’s, but rather an interpretation influenced by the robot’s characteristics. The drawings progressively cover the gallery’s walls, day after day.

I conceived Human Study #1 both as a performative theatrical installation. The work features a number of robots (1, 3 or 5), each one representing a stylised drawer. They are designed to be the most minimal robots capable of drawing from observation. The robots are of the Paul IV series. Their bodies are old wooden English exam school desks, each robot has a left handed planar robotic arm bolted to the desktop. The arm is designed to have the same proportions as a human but with only the possibility of moving the pen in the plane, it has four actuated joints. The last joint stands for the hand and can move up and down. On the hand an element from a compass is used to hold the pen, a black biro, a traditional Bic cristal medium.