Can you teach a robot to draw? We normally think of drawing as an (almost) exclusively human activity. While other animals, such as chimpanzees, can be trained to paint or draw, drawing isn’t something that is regularly observed in animals other than humans.

At SensiLab, we have been working for several years on making robots designed explicitly to create their own drawings. These drawing robots, or drawbots, are relatively simple, insect-like machines that often work cooperatively as swarms and exhibit common aspects of collective behaviour and emergent intelligence.

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Algorithmic music composition has always had a place in computing. One of the first applications Ada Lovelace proposed for the Analytic Engine almost 200 years ago was the generation of music compositions. 200 years has seen a lot of progress in this area but has also reiterated something musicians have always known… writing music is hard.

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Here at SensiLab we are designing, implementing and evaluating improvisational interfaces - computer interfaces for improvising in creative arts domains. Ultimately we are interested in realising the notion of machines as creative collaborators, and as part of this overall goal we seek to implement improvisational behaviours in machine agents, facilitate improvised exchanges between humans and computers, and create guidelines for designing interfaces that support improvised interaction.

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We’re excited today to launch a new research platform for anyone interested in exploring the creative possibilities of Artificial Intelligence.

ai.sensilab is a new online resource for all things at the intersection of contemporary creative practice and AI. The site will feature hands-on tutorials, research software, datasets, news and commissioned opinion writing by leading practitioners in the field. Our aim is to provide a valuable and expansive resource for researchers, creative artists and developers working at the frontiers of technology and creativity.

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