Idea 062 - Music festival dancing painting robotic marionettes in a million parts

This post is part of the 100 project ideas project. #The100DayProject. I am looking for feedback. Comment below or DM me via social media Instagram, Twitter.

One Line Pitch

A robotic marionettes that dances and makes generative art during a music festival

Description

This idea is based on Idea 58 - In a million parts. Of splitting a written work into many parts and making transformative art from each part.

Think of a seismograph for a music festival. A record of what happened at a specific time and place.

This is a robot that has a microphone to listen to the audio that it hears throughout a music festival. (Other sensors like vibration, weather, etc…). The robot then uses the audio as an input to generate a series of artworks. Each artwork is a frame of time at the Music festival, say 30-60 mins per section. A series of artworks will be generated over the whole festival. A 4 day festival has 96 parts.

These artworks are unique pieces that are specific to the time and place. I hope that people who go to the festival would be looking for a memento of the festival that is unique and memorable with a story.

What this robot looks like

The top is two puppets hanging from wires like Marionettes. Their wires are controlled by a series of servos that give them motion based on what the microphone and other sensors collect. They rotate, and bounce up and down to look like they are dancing. Their feet are made of ink brushes with feeder tubes in them. When they are “up”, the ink drips out of the feeder tubes onto the ink brushes and drips onto the paper below. When they are “down” the ink brushes do strokes of ink onto the paper.

Over time the paper should have a series of sweeping ink brush strokes and ink droplets scattered across the paper. The swirls should look like dancing feet paths.

The ink can be multiple colors if the marionettes have different feeder tubes for each color. Think of toes where each toe has a different color. Or there are several different marionettes, where each one has a different color, or style of brush, etc…

The ink that I use would need to be quick drying so that it doesn’t mix with the next sweep of the brushes. The ink should drip out instead of flooding the page.

For festivals I was thinking of using A2 paper, but this could also work on a large scale. Think of a whole series of marionettes all dancing and dripping ink together across the floor of a huge gallery space (50x20ft)

This could be used as installation art for the festival. Possible grants from the festival to show up with your dancing robot friend.

Unsorted

• No reason that marionettes need to look human
• Make a new marionette for each festival

Prior art

I’ve been to music festivals where there are acrylic or watercolor painters on the side of the dance floor doing their thing and selling the art work at the end of the event. Normally it is one pieces over the entire event.

• Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: Can’t Help Myself - [Video] Of an industrial robot trying to sweep up the blood in a gallery. Article
• Giant Marionettes - Street festival

japanese calligraphy, ink brush, circles, spirals, red, black, Dancing

Market

These artworks are unique pieces that are specific to the time and place. I hope that people who go to the festival would be looking for a memento of the festival that is unique and memorable with a story.