Laura Greig laura.greig(at)gmail.com

Ultimately, our empathy towards Nila (ascribing human-like traits to her actions and form) is what makes her teaching so successful. Without anthropomorphizing her, viewers would have minimal desire to explore the perception of a robot. Yet, because we can think of Nila in terms of our own experience, I believe we are more willing to expand our construction of the world and accept hers. Nila reveals, to her viewers, the very structure of her robotic language. Communicating with Nila, in turn, encourages viewers to examine their relationship to technology in a rapid, wiki-world. Greig explains, “I try to show people what it’s like to try and befriend every piece of technology around. Nila tries to show people what it’s like to sit perfectly still and track the motion of light around the room.” In a fast changing world, the artist’s most important role may be to examine these connections in order to help us relate to a new reality. Nila, though she has a life of her own, still expresses Greig’s own concerns and visions of reality. A tension exists between technology and art, between our day-to-day experience and Nila’s brushwork, making Nila’s project a logical venue to navigate our own relationship to technology.

My art is an effort to help non-human intelligences make their own art. I build ramshackle robots from household hardware and hobby electronics and teach them to paint. Sometimes, as I did here for Duchamp, I work with readymade machines. I help them find a medium suited to their body.

These two hygrothermographs, titled after The Large Glass, are analog alone. More than a few bachelors came calling for the beautiful bride with her golden drum; none of them so enchanted her as that janky WeatherMeasure. Now electricity flows between them. Please, push their buttons. They like it.

Laura Greig's robots often exhibit surprising behavior while performing routine tasks. Constructed as bodies with technological organs rather than tissue, Greig's works ask that we acknowledge their presence in the same way we might confront a stranger. Particularly since her robots are media-makers, actively producing images with the same subtle variations as those produced by human arms, the onus is on us to determine their role in our rapidly growing technocracy.