Artists' Views on Robotics Involvement in Painting Productions

TL;DR

This paper addresses how professional abstract artists perceive involvement of robotics in painting by directly comparing collaborations with humans and with an autonomous robot in a longitudinal within-subject study. It employs six painting sessions per participant (three with a human partner and three with a robot) followed by semi-structured interviews and reflexive thematic analysis to extract insights about agency, creative flow, and social presence. The findings reveal that human-human collaboration is more socially rich, whereas human-robot collaboration fosters reflection, autonomy, and playful experimentation, with varied perceptions of the robot’s agency and capabilities. The work offers design-facing implications for flexible mixed-initiative robotics in the arts, highlighting the importance of stakeholder input, long-term engagement, and multidisciplinary methods to advance human-robot co-creation in creative practice.

Abstract

As robotic technologies evolve, their potential in artistic creation becomes an increasingly relevant topic of inquiry. This study explores how professional abstract artists perceive and experience co-creative interactions with an autonomous painting robotic arm. Eight artists engaged in six painting sessions -- three with a human partner, followed by three with the robot -- and subsequently participated in semi-structured interviews analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Human-human interactions were described as intuitive, dialogic, and emotionally engaging, whereas human-robot sessions felt more playful and reflective, offering greater autonomy and prompting for novel strategies to overcome the system's limitations. This work offers one of the first empirical investigations into artists' lived experiences with a robot, highlighting the value of long-term engagement and a multidisciplinary approach to human-robot co-creation.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Study conditions: (a) artist-artist collaborative painting; (b) artist-robot collaborative painting.
• Figure 2: System architecture of the robotic painting platform.
• Figure 3: Close-up on robot painting tools displayed at the table: color palette, water container, and cleaning rag are each mounted on fixed, 3D-printed holders designed specifically for easy and autonomous robot access.
• Figure 4: (a) Robot painting on vertical easel with a fixed canvas size of 11x14in / 27.94x35.56cm; (b) Brush swapping mechanism. Top-left: mounted brush holder on the UF850 robotic arm. Top-right: main body and brush collet with a paintbrush. Bottom-left: internal cam-slotted geometry of the holder. Bottom-right: 3D model of the flexible brush collet designed for tool-free insertion and removal.
• Figure 5: (a) Gelb Rot Blau, Vasilij Vasil'evič Kandinskij, 1925. Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; emblematic example of his color theory linking primary colors with geometric forms, which inspired the experiment set up. (b) Color set-up inspired by Kandinskij's theory for this experiment.