Rob and Nick are recasting 1,000 iconic pop culture personalities using their Light Drawing robot. A continuation of previous practice, these portraits are a Warholian take on ‘capturing celebrity’.
These digital works are created in physical space. Source photographs are fed through 130,000 lines of specially-developed code to produce instructions for the robot to execute. In complete darkness, the robot triggers a digital camera to open its shutter, then proceeds to draw with light in space, controlling the speed of its movements, the width and colour of the ‘strokes’ it makes, until the image — an accumulation over time of light placed in space — is complete and the shutter is closed.
The finished work is a photograph created without any human interaction — purely light moving in space, controlled by a robotic arm, captured by a digital camera.