Priced at almost $75,000, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog is very expensive. For the same kind of money, you can buy yourself an entry-level Porsche Cayman sports car. But what if I told you that the robo-dog is more than capable of generating a lot more money than its price tag? Surprised, right? I’m sure that you are aware that Spot is not a robot pet or a toy for entertainment. The AI-powered four-legged machine is a seriously capable robot that can carry out tasks that are near-impossible for humans. However, a Polish-born artist named Agnieszka Pilat found out that the robot dog can also be a pretty good artist. She trained three Spot robot dogs to make abstract paintings. Some of those paintings were so good that they were sold for up to $40,000!
Pilat is an artist-in-residence at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and has previously collaborated with Agility Robotics and worked with its humanoid robot Digit. For her latest project, she got hold of three Spot dogs named Basia, Omuzana ‘Vanya,’ and Bunny, and taught them how to hold a paintbrush in their “mouths” and create abstract paintings. As a result, Pilat and her three robot dogs have been rewarded with a four-month residency at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. “For my show ‘Heterobota,’ the robots are fully autonomous,” Pilat told Business Insider. “This was a significant shift in my practice as previously I was always in the studio with the robots, where they felt more like an extension of my arm.”
The exhibition features 36 paintings autonomously created by the three robot dogs, which were inspired by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat’s angular style of artwork and Cy Twombly’s calligraphy-driven paintings. Those attending the exhibition, which runs until April 7, 2024, will also be able to see the trio of Boston Dynamics’ robots painting, self-navigating inside the gallery, and even autonomously charging themselves.
Pilat says she spent months training the Spots and sought the help of engineers working for Boston Dynamics. She claims that the robot dogs have also developed individual personalities during the process, which are very different from each other.
Pilat sold one of the custom robodog paintings in 2022 for $40,000 at a charity auction for Ukrainian dogs, while another one was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2021 for $31,500. The robot dogs use artificial intelligence (AI) along with machine learning (ML) and complex algorithms to create the artwork autonomously. “I like to think of these paintings as possibly ancient scrolls or cave drawings — we might be witnessing the birth of a new civilization, and with it, a new language; perhaps the first attempt at communication,” she said. However, she also claimed that these robots were not intended to replace human creators and even compared them to kindergartener learning to draw, saying “there is ‘a sense of spontaneity and playfulness in the paintings.”
