A Lesson In Drawing artificially

Robots, Performance

This project is a robotic performance of Nizar Qabani’s "A lesson in Drawing". This poems’ general theme is the feeling of being “stateless” and mourning war; it discusses the effects of war through a conversation between a son and a father.
I chose to adapt this poem into a robotic performance to play into the wide conversations happening on the implications of integrating robots into society from all the different perspectives of the involved parties. This performance and poem perfectly carries on these conversations by prompting the user to think about what belonging, homeland, fatherhood and the different qualities described in the poem means to robots of if they mean anything and at what point would these things mean to us in relation to the robot (thinking about purely robotic environments and interrelationships and integration).
The robot was programmed with an arduino to move between 4 different scenes with different sets, scenes and actions, each scene corresponds to a stanzas of the poem. The intent behind each set, scene and action is explained in detail in the project documentation.
Check out the code, documentation and video: