A Brief History of Art Made with Roombas
Here’s one of the more unpredictable entries in the recent Biennale Interieur, a design exposition and event in Belgium: a dozen dancing Roombas.
(Dezeen)
Specifically, Dezeen reports, interaction designer Pietro Leoni “hacked” the robotic vacuum cleaners to perform a choreographed waltz of sorts in sync to Strauss’ “The Blue Danube.” Here’s a short video clip from Dezeen.
Robot vacuums don’t seem like the most obvious creative tool, but it turns out that Roombas and similar devices have been deployed to unusual artistic ends before. Let’s take a hike back through Roomba art history, shall we?
A few years back, for instance, some enterprising art makers started creating “light paintings” by attaching colored LED lights to Roombas and making long-exposure photographs. There’s a whole Flickr pool devoted to such imagery.
By IBRoomba, via Laughing Squid.
By Mike Balavia, via Laughing Squid.
This YouTuber even made a tribute to the creators of these light drawings, with original music:
Separately, this person rigged up a Roomba with some Sharpies, constricted its movements — and created a pretty cool abstract drawing:
Going back even further, an artist named Bobby Zokaites, using rebuilt Roombas, had the devices make new paintings at a gallery show in Newark. That was in 2007, and good documentation is hard to find — but you can see some of the results on the artist’s site, or watch a related video on … MySpace (!).
Screen grab from “Roomba Painting.”
Finally, this video may not technically qualify as art.
But it should.
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