Gale Crater Drawn by a Robotic Arm

“Gale Crater Drawn by a Robotic Arm” is a series of light paintings drawn by an industrial UR10 robot arm. Robots have become a ubiquitous aspect of modern daily life, no longer limited to the premises of industrial settings, lending itself to novel creative applications from space travel to fine arts installations. The series explore notions of the ephemeral, overlays of data, space and time, through the compositions of light. Using a topographic model of Gale Crater accessed through NASA’s open resources, we generated a topographical contour path through code and programmed a robotic arm with LED lights to simulate the path. The work intends to expose the high dependency on technology in space science in order to access data and speculate the nature of our relationship with the cosmos. Interactive Architecture Lab Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London 2019 Researchers: Anne-Heloise Dautel, Irem Bugdayci, Robert Wuss