By Mar Centenera

Buenos Aires, Jul 27 (EFE).– Are androids creative? The question becomes inevitable when faced with robots that create portraits of whoever poses in front of them, an avatar dancer that improvises choreographies, and a computer that creates its own language at the exhibition of artificial intelligence that opened over the weekend in Buenos Aires.

The answer is complex and depends on what one means by creativity, warns Belgian scientist and artist Luc Steels, curator of the exhibit “Artificial Intelligence: Art in New Media,” which has been on show since last Friday.

“It’s like an airplane – it doesn’t fly like a bird but it uses the same principles and it really flies, it’s not a simulation,” Steels told EFE, using an analogy for works created equally by machines and by humans.

Behind the robots at the exhibition are humans who designed, constructed and programmed them in such a way that they can draw, speak and dance, though the Belgian scientist noted that due to the multiplicity of variables at play, the results are pretty much unpredictable.

The clearest example consists of the three “Pauls” created by French artist Patrick Tresset, which take about 30 minutes to draw with a ballpoint pen their individual portraits of the person sitting on a chair in front of them.

The eye of a camera captures the image of the model and sends the data to the robotic arm of each of them, which interprets the information in its own style, one with quick, nervous strokes, another with greater precision, and the third halfway between the other two.

“It’s intense when you’re sitting there, you get the impression you’re being drawn by ‘something,'” Tresset, who was a painter and designer for 15 years before beginning his study of intelligent machines, told EFE.

The interplay between visitors and the works is one of the most noteworthy features of the exhibition at the Borges Cultural Center, which is also the scene this week of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, being attended by some 1,200 specialists in the field.

Without volunteers willing to pose for photos, one work that would remain lifeless is “Look into the Box” by Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson, which has a computer that processes data from the images and transforms them into an audible language of its own invention. Nor would there be any smooth moves by the avatar created by Alexander Berman and Valencia James without some human stepping up to dance with it. EFE