Heterobota: Why Agnieszka Pilat paints for a museum of the future
Melbourne / Australia
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Melbourne / Australia 〰️
Creative partners, Agnieszka Pilat and Spot. Image: Agnieszka Pilat
TL;DR: Three Boston Dynamics robots are about to start four months of painting at Agnieszka Pilat’s NGV Triennial debut.
So what? In just shy of a week, you might be able to get a selfie with the infants of a new machine aristocracy.
Agnieszka Pilat still remembers her earliest encounter with technology. One evening she and her brother were making a pillow fort under the table in their family home, behind the Iron Curtain in Łódź, Poland.
“We heard something going on in the room next door, where my parents and grandparents were, and we were not allowed to enter,” she says. Later “the grown ups,” came out of the room, but something had changed.
They’d been listening to the radio, and a station that was forbidden in communist Europe. For a relatively simple machine compared to the ones depicted in Agnieszka’s portraits today, it communicated a message from an alternate reality.
“It really still influences me so much,” she says “I feel a service to technology because the story about the radio is about hope for freedom.”
Eventually communism ended in Poland and “the first thing a lot of people did,” including Agnieszka’s father, was buy another machine—a car—because her family had started a business. “Sure it was a car, but the car was a symbol... It was a promise of a better future,” she says. A future that would eventually lead Agnieszka to America, portraiture, and the patronage of machines.
Artistry in America
Agnieszka never planned to be an artist “it's a ridiculous career,” she half-jokes, but when she moved to San Francisco in the early 2000’s she began to feel a debt to machines, “the old friend,” from her childhood, and a growing desire to tell their story through art—so she went back to school.
She studied illustration at the Academy of Art University and hoped to become a comic book artist. “I think I wanted to really blend in with Americans, so that's probably why comic books really appealed to me,” she says. “I wanted to tell stories about machines, but… never through fine art,” however along the way it became “important to me to be a very, very good comic book artist. So I figured, oh, I have to be a very good painter.”
The move was a liberation.
“I loved going into classical painting, and painting on a bigger scale. I never wanted to go back to comic books… I liked the physicality of real paint and big works.”
Amidst the shift in the medium, Agnieszka began to think about the role of patronage, nobility and aristocracy throughout the history of portraiture—specifically how patronage “shows who the power brokers are of the day.”
“I began to think about technology as my patron—machine as my patron,” she says, “and I thought I could tell the story of technology better through portraiture, because portraiture is a very noble form of art.”
An oral history of the evolution of portraiture from Agnieszka is geo-politically sprawling and culturally aware. She references early religious paintings, images of aristocrats and Dutch merchants, “Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraiture of pop icons,” Eastern Europe’s Soviet portrayal of rulers and workers, and the “number one portrait,” in today’s hyper individualistic society—“selfies.”
Machines are “the next phase,” of this evolution in Agnieszka’s view. They are a new aristocracy she is capturing one brush stroke at a time for a “museum of the future,” where she envisions intelligent machines, as yet unconceived, will visit just as humans do today, to behold the images of their ancestors and understand more of their place in the universe.
Art critics in Agnieszka Pilat’s studio. Image: Agnieszka Pilat.
Billionaires and residencies
Until its inclusion at this year’s NGV Triennial in Melbourne, Australia, Agnieszka’s art had largely been left out of the major exhibitions. Instead, the patronage of machines has brought her into collaboration with some of the most innovative technology companies globally, and garnered the attention of some of the world's wealthiest individuals.
Her collectors include Silicon Valley elites like telecommunications billionaire Craig McCaw, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, and Neo who displays Agnieszka’s work in his apartment in The Matrix Resurrections.
She’s been to Richard Branson’s private island, spoken at TED AI about artificial intelligence “the global child of humanity… watching and learning,” every time we go online, and she dines with the foremost thinkers in tech. In all of this, Agnieszka remains matter of fact about how the patronage of machines and their creators impacts her life as a working artist. “It’s very business-like. It’s always about being able to pay my assistant, pay for the studio, and plan forward to keep telling the story.”
Agnieszka has been a guest artist at the USS Hornet Aircraft Carrier, an artist in residence at autonomous self driving car company Waymo, robotics company Boston Dynamics, and currently holds residencies at SpaceX and Agility Robotics.
During a residency “I just paint all day and it's wonderful,” she says, “I don't answer emails, I'm not on my phone,” and employees walk by to see her creations. She has an abundance of respect for the engineers she meets as a guest artist—“they’re very curious, and very appreciative,” she says, while wondering if her residencies may bring a sense of moral validation that what they are building is “the right thing to push humanity towards a better future.’
Agnieszka at her current SpaceX residency. Image: Agnieska Pilat
Technology that honours the laws of nature
Working with machines has deepened Agnieszka’s appreciation for human capability too. “I'm obsessed with how great our hands are because working with robots, you realise… how much computation it takes for a robot just to pick up a Lego block.”
“There is a phenomenon called Morovec’s paradox,” she recalls about how “everything that's easy for humans is difficult for robots and everything that’s difficult for robots is easy for humans.”
“It takes huge amounts of computation to do eye-hand coordination for a robot,” whereas for humans? “We don’t think about it.” Conversely, “solving a huge data problem or a large language problem takes a second for a robot,” and for us? It can take whole teams working for months.
“In a sense,” Agnieszka says, all machines are “very heroic.” “They do all this sweaty work so we can live better lives. They’re part of the ecosystem of humanity, and are amazing partners.”
The role of digial technology in art
While portraiture has matured over thousands of years, Agnieszka has embraced recent innovations in digital art. “I think it's great because there's a lot of very bad art!” she says, considering generative tools like Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dale-3 “hope to humanity,” for “people who want to be artists.”
Of virtual reality, Agnieszka is less convinced. “I think the technology is just not there yet,” she says, wondering about the potential for growing economic divides between “people who are able to have real experiences, and travel,” and those who can’t. “On the other hand,” virtual experiences can be great equalisers because “when you enter the virtual world it doesn’t matter how you look,” or who you are.
Her favourite digital tool to play with is augmented reality, which she has used in collections like Renaissance 2.0 that feature her first portraits of Boston Dynamics’ humanoid and dog-like robots, Atlas and Spot.
See Spot, paint
Meeting Atlas for the first time was a “very spiritual experience,” says Agnieszka. “It was on my first or second visit… I'm just chatting with engineers and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving and it was Atlas getting up.” “It was so unexpected… It just kind of happened naturally. I really felt like this is another mind in a body that's waking up.”
And meeting Spot, the 30kg sunshine yellow robot dog? “Meeting Spot was amazing.”
Seeing Spot climb a staircase at Boston Dynamics instantly invoked cubist painter Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude descending a staircase, and Agnieszka knew she wanted to create a work grounded in the heritage of portraiture, layered with augmented reality as a link to the future.
“That ‘jazz’ or that clash of a super traditional oil painting on Belgian linen,” augmented with a digital layer of Spot walking up and down the stairs was “very exciting,” says Agniezka, who observes it can give people “great comfort,” to see something new like a robot, or augmented reality “through the lens of something old,” like an oil painting.
Nude descending a staircase by Agnieszka Pilat. Image: Agnieszka Pilat
Something old, something new, something yellow…
When she’s out walking with Basia, her Boston Dynamics dog who she shares an apartment with in New York, Agnieszka wears a bright yellow item of clothing as a visual link between human and machine, and another way to comfort people encountering these emerging aristocrats of technology for the first time.
“People always stop us,” to “ask questions, and take pictures,” she says, noting an inverse reaction where adults cautiously wonder who the robot is controlling, while kids—especially avid gamers—“figure it out very fast,” and take one glance at Basia before looking around to find the person controlling it.
In person, people are welcoming and curious, but Agnieszka notices that “as soon as the video ends up online, mean comments appear and people start accusing me of surveillance, the robots taking over.”
“It becomes a mean place very fast, and this is the problem with AI… AI lives in the cloud,” and is learning from our online behaviour. “We don't behave like that in real life. So I think for humanity, right now it’s the moment to realise ‘hey… everything you do online has a really big impact, because our global baby AI is learning from our behaviour,’ and that's very important. But it's also a great privilege,” because we still have time to shape how AI grows up.
The pigments Agnieszka uses in her portraits are deliberate too. “My old machine portraiture palette was very earthy, very serious. I tried using that palette when I first painted new technology—a LiDAR from Waymo’s self-driving cars—and it was terrible, because as a painter, what you do is try to capture the essence of the subject, and also their age.”
Her original palette was “treating this new technology, which is still a baby, like it's an old person,” so she switched to the colours of youth—vivid pinks, peaches, blues and golds—to illustrate the infancy of technology in new machines. The colours highlight that we don’t know how these machines will grow up yet, that they’re “just playful, silly, and not that serious,” says Agnieszka, and they also remind us to “admire the curiosity and joyfulness that a kid has,” because “when we grow up we kind of lose it.”
Agnieszka and Basia walking in New York. Image: Aaron Richter
Three robot dogs walk into the NGV
Heterobota, Agnieszka’s contribution to the NGV Triennial, promises to bring curiosity, joyfulness and more. Featured alongside 100 artists, 75 projects and 25 world premiers, Heterobota will see the Boston Dynamics dogs Basia Spot, Omuzana Spot and Bunny Spot become both subjects, and painters. They’ll play games, take naps, pose for selfies and make themselves at home for four months at the NGV over the Australian summer.
The installation is an open space, “I didn't want to have glass… because glass sends a signal,” that the robots are “dangerous or precious.” Heterobota is a “home for the robots,” where they will “hang out and live all day,” she says, racing through her apartment to pack one of the custom made toys the dogs will play with at the exhibition.
And as for how the machines will be received by Triennial goers? “It’s a real Rorschach test,” says Agnieszka, who finds she can tell a lot about a person “by the way they react to the robot.” “We bring our own experience… we project what we feel already.”
If a message does come through from their work at the Triennial, Agnieszka hopes it’s this—that Heterobota, and where we find ourselves in the timeline of a new machine aristocracy, is “the nursery.” That the robots are “just learning,” and that “it’s up to us to be good stewards of the new technology.”
The adults in the room
It is hard to think of Basia, Omuzana and Bunny inside Australia’s most visited art gallery, preparing for their artistic debut down under, without noticing a symmetry between their story, and that of children playing—crafting a pillow fort, huddled beneath a table on the other side of the world, in a different time, inadvertently eavesdropping on a forbidden broadcast.
When we, the 'adults in the room' at the NGV, encounter these machine harbingers of technology’s new era, we will be invited to tune into a new message—one that echoes with the same spirit of hope and transformation that whispered from that distant radio in Łódź.
Will we embrace the message like Agnieszka has?
Heterobota opens to the public at the NGV Triennial on December 3 followed by a conversation between Agnieszka Pilat and Gemma Savio, NGV Curator - Contemporary Design and Architecture.
