*12 Robot Paintings, Birth of Venus, after Botticelli, after Warhol.* Painting time: 10:04:03, Stroke count: 1,902, 23 September - 8 October 2021. Acrylic on wooden board, 12 parts, each 53 × 53 cm.

London-based husband and wife art partnership Rob and Nick Carter have worked together for 25 years across a wide range of media, including light work, sculpture and photography – but in recent years they have focused primarily on setting up a dialogue between art history and cutting edge new technology. Indeed, they believe they may have been the first artists to use 3D printing, computer-generated imagery and robotics in their work. That love of combining art history with whatever is newest might be framed as asking the question: what would the old masters do if they were living now? The Carters have addressed that through two main means: digital transformation and the use of robots.

Portrait of Rob and Nick Carter. Photography by Greg Williams.

The ‘Transforming Paintings’ series started from a 2006 report that the typical museum visitor spends just 4-6 seconds looking at each painting – and if that’s changed since, it’s probably by the seconds being used to take a photograph! The Carters wondered ‘how could we make people look for longer, and reward them for sustained looking?’ Their answer was to bring old master paintings to life. They collaborated with the Moving Picture Company, who normally worked with short sequences for film or commercial use – for example, by animating Monty the Penguin in John Lewis’s 2014 Christmas advert. Rob and Nick’s plan was to stretch the time out in the main traditional genres of painting.

Extract from Transforming Still Life Painting, 2009-12. 3 hour looped film, computer, frame. 71 × 58 × 13 cm, after Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621), Vase with Flowers in a Window, 1618, oil on panel 64 × 46 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

They started with a classic Dutch golden age still life: Transforming Still Life Painting, 2009-12, is based on Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase with Flowers in a Window, 1618. That features several insects ready to move, 59 flower heads which slowly open up, and a window backdrop through which the landscape changes. It took four years to complete a three hour film, which does include – as all in the series do – one moment at which everything is in exactly the right place to match the original painting. In 2013-14, Transforming Still Life Painting was exhibited notably alongside loans in ‘Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis’ at The Frick Collection – making the Carters the first-ever living artists to show there. In 2018 it went to the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht, where one woman impressed Rob and Nick by sitting in front of it the whole way through. Most viewers, of course, will come and go: the Carters recently heard from a collector who told them that after 11 years with the work in her kitchen, she had ‘seen the dragonfly for the first time’! Film transformations of other still lifes, portraits, landscapes, a Vanitas and a nude followed on up to 2018, and Rob and Nick are now planning to return to the series with a seascape.

Still from Transforming Flowers in a Vase, 2016 - 70-minute looped film, monitor with player, framed, 67 × 61 × 10 cm, after Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) *Flowers in a Glass Vase*, 1704 - oil on canvas, 108 × 90 × 7 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Each film, the Carters say, is ‘of its time and embraces whatever is technically possible’. Take Constable’s cornfields. When they started working with that, the available technology could only blow the corn left to right to left ‘like a windscreen wiper’. That looked artificial, so they waited a few years – until the CGI technology become available for a more sophisticated realisation. Some works use 4k film cameras rather than CGI, but the story is similar. Twenty years ago the available set-ups wouldn’t have had the capacity to film decaying flowers for 15 days continuously, as required by Transforming Flowers in a Vase, 2016 – time lapse photography would have been necessary, as used for Sam Taylor-Wood’s well-known Still Life, 2001. Now it’s possible to film it all, then edit out periods of inactivity. ‘The data files’ are absolutely massive’, say Rob and Nick: ‘Every four hours, day and night, the cameraman had to change the SD card’. The advantage is that they avoid repeating loops, which they have found ‘the brain works out too quickly’.

The Carters have also made sculptural transformations, which work differently, but are equally data-heavy. They transform the historic into the contemporary, and 2D to 3D, but not still to moving. Their take on Van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888, started with getting a really good scan of the painting from National Gallery, from which they generated a computerised image. Using real sunflowers as the model, they then generated what the back of the blooms would look like. Each flower was 3D-printed in wax – that took 50 hours per bloom – then the lost wax process was used to cast it in bronze. Each edition requires all fifteen flowers to be so printed and cast.

In 2018, the Carters explain, ‘we read an article saying the chance of an artist being automated within the next 15 years was 4%. That was a small percentage but not zero, which intrigued us, and we started having a conversation about various drawing devices, like harmonograph machines that were used in the 18th century to combine two circular movements to create patterns. We moved on to talking about robotic arms, and got in touch with Kuka, a German-based company that’s one of the largest manufacturers. They responded straight away saying they’d love to see what we could do with one of their robots, and it was delivered within a couple of weeks. The first paintbrush stroke was so exciting!’ The robot’s motion feels very human, as it is modelled on a human arm – ‘according to Kuka that’s the best way, as our movement is highly efficient: the only addition is the ability of the wrist to spin fully around’.

Dark Factory Portraits, Jean-Michel Basquiat Robot Painting Timelapse. Painting time: 14:41:15, Stroke count: 6,713, 2-3 December 2019, Acrylic on wooden board, 24 × 24 in | 61 × 61 cm.

The Carters’ first robot project was Dark Factory Portraits, developed from 2018 onwards and shown at Ben Brown Fine Art in 2020. Kuka loved the idea of having their robot in an art context, and supported the installation of the robot in the gallery, where it was kept behind glass – something of a contrast with the studio situation, where the Carters concede that they were ‘slightly cavalier’, working with it in open although ‘it can’t see what it’s doing and could decapitate you – people have died working with robots’. Safely contained in the gallery, Heidi (as the robot was named) was surrounded by its output: black and white portraits as an homage to some of the artists who might have been replaced by robots were they born in later times. The idea was not actually to displace artists, so much as to explore what was possible. Rob and Nick see the robot as just another tool, and artists have always used tools. ‘Originally some people were horrified’, they say, ‘thinking it was soulless – but we put the soul in.’ Perhaps, they speculate, the increased capacity for production will turn the creative side of artists away from making towards ‘being their own curator – you can make all these things quite quickly, but what do take forward and how?’

Hundreds of tests led Rob and Nick to a preferred style: ‘We wanted square format portraits that look like they might have been generated from a 1960’s Hasselblad, as used by David Bailey. That means a narrow depth of field, with just the eyes in full focus and other features slightly softer. That style is now set in stone for the series. We call them ‘Dark Factory Portraits’, not just as a nod to Warhol, but because a lot of factories using robots have no light, as robots have no eyes and that saves electricity.’

Dark Factory Portraits. Andy Warhol Robot Painting Timelapse. Painting time: 38:56:00. Stroke count: 11,629. 29 February - 7 March 2020. Acrylic on wooden board. 48 × 48 in | 122 × 122 cm.

100,000 lines of bespoke code, written under the Carters’ stylistic direction, were needed to turn the photographic source into information that the robot can understand. Rob and Nick emphasise that every single creative decision is made by them – they, too, are not replaceable artists – but the approach proved helpfully practical, especially as the show coincided with the pandemic. As they explain: ‘any further works use the same code, which became a very Covid-secure means of commissioning portraits – we couldn’t use our studio in Acton, but wherever people were in the world, they could watch the robot making their painting in the gallery via a webcam.’

Subsequent series of robot paintings operate similarly – by applying a different unique set of code instructions to the sources selected – but have employed colour in the way for which the Carters were previously renowned. 12 Robot Paintings, Birth of Venus, after Botticelli, after Warhol plays on both Botticelli’s iconic 15th century original and Warhol’s also-famous versions from 1984. Each of the twelve has exactly the same 1,902 brushstrokes. Colour aside, they are identical unless you go down to a super-detailed level. ‘The only other changes’, Rob and Nick explain, ‘are due to studio conditions – such as a change in humidity, the consistency of the paint, or brush fatigue over the course of 12 panels’ – you’d expect some wear from those 22,824 strokes.

Robot Paintings, Birth of Venus, after Botticelli, after Warhol Timelapse. Painting time: 10:04:03, Stroke count: 1,902, 23 September - 8 October 2021. Acrylic on wooden board, 12 parts, each 53 × 53 cm

The Carters have recently exploited the repeating ability of the robot in a different way. Orange Tree, Saint-Paul de Vence Robot Painting Diptych, 2022 has the robot arm do one side and the exact same brushstroke on the other side in turn to make a mirrored diptych. Only the angle and amount of paint might vary, leading to very marginal differences other than the reflection. The series explores the sites of famous paintings made in the south of France, in this case referencing Chagall’s late 70’s diptychs. The quantification of the diptych is ‘Painting time 27.46:00 hours, Stroke count 10,274. Rob and Nick like all the data in their version of ‘painting by numbers’. Perhaps it would be interesting to have comparable data for human painters. The Carters haven’t collected that, but they did make films of several painters’ palettes, filming from directly above during six hour sessions so that the mixing and selection of paint could be seen. They told the artists to ignore the camera, so tea breaks did occur and one artist even took a nap – quite a contrast to the robot’s mode!

*Orange Tree, Saint-Paul de Vence - Robot Painting*. Painting Time: 27:46:00, Stroke Count: 10,274 (Diptych), 2022. Acrylic on wooden board, Framed: 54 x 44 x 3 cm.

The Carters have now acquired a second robot. Peter – as it is called – ‘paints’ with light, and is, in a playful reversal of sexual stereotypes, smaller and more agile than the bigger Heidi. Peter holds six fibre-optic light sources in its head, each capable of generating a theoretical range of 16 million DMS-controlled colours from RGB mixtures – all programmable. The robot operates in complete darkness, triggering a digital camera at opposite end of the darkroom to open its shutter, after which it starts to draw with light in space. The shutter is kept open for up to 3 hours. It’s another version of ‘painting by numbers’, but easier to control in the absence of the inconsistencies of paint itself. The use of light to ‘paint’ harks back not just to art history – Man Ray, film of Pablo Picasso, Bruce Nauman – but also to the Carters’ own early works, when they moved flashlights around by hand. They were working literally and figuratively in the dark: now, they point out, digital cameras mean they can see the results immediately and go back to adjust them. Peter it is, then, who has carried out the instructions for the recent set of Robot Light Portraits. Those are programmed to pick the colours out of photographic source, though the Carters can override that if they wish.

*Robot Light Portrait, Björk,* 2023. Supergloss print, framed, 43 × 42·5 cm.

What next? After five years working with them, Rob and Nick believe they have just about got complete control of what their robots can do. The plan is to stick to the two robots ‘who are our friends’, adding new programs – but also to loosen things up a bit. They may experiment with abstraction, they may allow the robots more of a ‘creative role’ in what they produce, so that the results cannot be predicted so fully. What we can predict is that Rob and Nick Carter’s ongoing journey along the edge of the technically possible will continue to generate stimulating and thought-provoking new angles on the traditions of art.

‘Rob and Nick Carter: 25 Years’ continues at 5A Bathurst Street, London W2 2SD until 15th February 2024.

For more on Rob and Nick Carter and their work, please visit their website here.

ROB AND NICK CARTER: HISTORY AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY