Leonel Moura (born December 26, 1948 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a conceptual artist whose work shifted in the late 1990s from photo based work to

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

and

Robotic art Robotic art is any artwork that employs some form of robotic or automated technology. There are many branches of robotic art, one of which is robotic installation art, a type of installation art that is programmed to respond to viewer interactions ...

. Since then he has produced several Painting Robots and the Robotarium, a zoo for robots. RAP (Robotic Action Painter) (2006) is a robot that makes drawings based on

emergence In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergenc ...

and stigmergy, decides when the work is ready, and signs it, is displayed as a permanent installation at the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

in New York.

Robots

ArtSbot (Art

Swarm Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving ''en masse'' or migrating in some direction. ...

Robots), 2003, comprise several small autonomous robots, called Mbots, each equipped with color detection sensors, obstacle avoidance sensors, a microcontroller and actuators, for locomotion and pen manipulation. Mbots have two distinct behaviors: the random behavior that initializes the process by activating a pen, based on a small probability (usually 2/256), whenever the color sensors read white; and the positive feed-back behavior that reinforces the color detected by the sensors, activating the corresponding pen (since there are two pens, the color circle is split into two ranges - 'warm' and 'cold'). With this process the collective set of robots generate compositions where from a random background some color clusters emerge. RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006, work alone but based on the same principles of emergence and stigmergy. Some improvements however produce rather distinct compositions from those of the ArtSbot swarm. Some of the new skills are: to determine the length and shape of each trace, the capacity to decide, in a non-linear mode, the moment to stop and the ability to sign. Additionally RAP works with six color pens and the RGB sensors are disposed in a grid of 3x3 which permits to detect local patterns and not only colors. ISU, 2006, is very similar to RAP but is able to write letters and build words. In this fashion it makes compositions that resemble some of the

Lettrist Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture ...

works from the 1950s and automatism.
Robotarium X is a large-scale steel glass construction lodging forty-five different robots, most powered by photovoltaic energy and fully autonomous. RUR, the birth of the robot In 2010 Leonel Moura creates a new version of the theatre play RUR with robots.
R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots is a classic playwright written by Karel Capek in the 1920s in which the word ROBOT was coined. Men and robots clash resulting in the extermination of mankind and the emergence of robots as a new dominant species. The play was always staged with human actor’s transvestite as robots. Moura’s new version displays, for the first time, real robots interacting on stage with human actors.
RUR, the birth of the robot, debuted in August 2010 at the Itáu Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil. During the 2017 edition of The New Art Fest (Lisbon) the artist installed BeBot,umbigomagazine.com: "Reviewing the New Art Fest 2017"
/ref> a swarm of robot-painters demonstratimg the idea of ''future autonomous art''.

Books

Moura, Leonel et al. (2009) ''INSIDE rt and science', Lisbon, LxXL edition
Moura, Leonel (2009) ''Robot Poetry'', Coimbra, Water Museum edition
Moura, Leonel (2009) ''RAP (Robotic Action Painter)'', Tavira, Tavira Museum Edition
Moura, Leonel (2007) ''Robotarium'', Lisbon, LxXL edition
Moura, Leonel et al. (2005) ''Bioart - A new Kind of Art'', Lisbon, Edition: Prates Gallery
Moura, Leonel and Pereira, Henrique Garcia (2004
Man + Robots: Symbiotic Art
Villeurbanne, Institut d'Art Contemporain, Lyon/Villeurbanne
Moura, Leonel (2003) ''Formigas, Vagabundos e Anarquia (Portuguese)'', Lisbon, Edition: AAAL, Out-of-print
Moura, Leonel et al. (2002

Cascais. Utopia Biennial
Moura, Leonel (1995

(French), Villeurbanne, Edition: Institut d'Art Contemporain, Lyon/Villeurbanne

References

Rhizome
On Robotarium

On Robotarium

Profile
Addressing Collective Robotics in Artistic Terms by Leonel Moura & Henrique Garcia Pereira
A text on Robot Art
MIT
on MIT ''Artificial Life'' cover
Architect Magazine
on Automatic Architecture

Symbiotic Art as a new type of game recombining art, science and philosophy, Leonel Moura & Henrique Garcia Pereira
Symbiotic Art Manifesto
2004 External links
Leonel Moura
website
RAP
at AMNH * {{DEFAULTSORT:Moura, Leonel 1948 births Living people Moura, Lenonel Robotic art